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Sydney Brenner - Biology doesn't allow for relaxing baths (49/236)

804 views · Published 5 July 2017 · 1:38 · Indexed 23 October 2026

Channel: Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People · 2017 · Science & Technology

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To hear more of Sydney Brenner’s stories, go to the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zf13v0OEdt8&list=PLVV0r6CmEsFyxf1sRqxZgh-06WFw4zgPj

South African Sydney Brenner (1927-2019), who jointly discovered messenger RNA, was a pioneer in the field of genetics and molecular biology. He was one of three co-recipients of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. [Listener: Lewis Wolpert; date recorded: 1994]


TRANSCRIPT: The trouble with theory in biology is it's not like that in physics, there's no way you can use it. You see… I mean, Leó Szilárd used to tell me that the one thing that happened when he went into biology is he couldn't take a nice bath. When he was a physicist, he could go into a bath and he could lie there for three hours and he could think about physics, but he said when he went into biology, no sooner did he get in the bath then he'd have to get out and look up another fact. So he was always unable then to take a... a relaxed bath, and I think that is the nature, because you have to ask yourself, who... you know, what had this all been about, because this is one of those remarkable things in biology that is, you know, absolutely true, yet absolutely vacuous. There's nothing you can do about it. I mean, it tells you how things might work; it doesn't tell you how you can make a mouse. That's in the end… we're always preoccupied with these questions of detail. So that's… but I think, you know, having had this connection with this kind of thinking, having, you know, tried to teach myself enough mathematics at least to be able to deal with a mathematical argument, but I think, you know, the thing that I've always realised I'm much better at is actually, you know, doing the real thing in a lab.

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