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Sydney Brenner - Crick, Watson and the first model of the double helix (56/236)

671 views · Published 5 July 2017 · 2:21 · Indexed 29 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]

TRANSCRIPT: We went to Cambridge, and we went by car. It was a small car. It was very cold I remember, and the car wasn't heated. No one had heaters in cars. And we must have arrived in Cambridge in the late morning at, say, 11, or this. We went into the Austin Wing of the Cavendish Laboratory; I went in with Jack and Leslie, and we went into the room that was lined with brick, and there on the side there, I can remember was this small… was this model made of all the plate and the plates for the bases, and the… this is the original model with everything was screwed together, and I could see the double helix there. And Francis was sitting there – it's the first time that I met him – and of course he couldn't stop talking. And he just went on and on and on and on, and it was very inspiring, you see. And they talked really about… more about the second paper. See, Jim stood there, and Jim, I had the feeling was get… he was there at his desk in that room, which I came to occupy later when I came to the Cavendish. And Jim was… Jim was saying… well, you know, just interspersing, and of course I got talking more to Jim later on. Francis had to go somewhere, but I spent the rest of the day with Jim. Now, the… what we talked about mostly was... not was... not the structure itself, but of the biological implications. Namely that which appeared in the second paper, which of course at that stage neither papers had appeared. This was prior. The paper appeared in May, so the paper was expected in a few weeks. The second paper appeared a little later than that.

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