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Sydney Brenner - Making plans with James Watson (78/236)

408 views · Published 5 July 2017 · 2:06 · Indexed 14 November 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: [LW] What about your journey with Jim? Did you actually talk science? I mean, you were together a long time.

We talked… we talked a lot of science, you know. But at that stage everything was at the beginning and everything was plans, you know, and plans can be very unsatisfying. I liked the story; we once had a… a Swedish biochemist came to visit us, and I said to him, 'What do you do in Sweden?' He said, 'Ah, in summer, the girls… the most beautiful girls in the world'. So I said, 'But summer's only six weeks'. I said, 'What do you do for the other 46 weeks?' He said, 'We plan for the summer'. So plans are very unsatisfying and everything was plans, you know – we're going to do the co-linearity problem. At that stage people like Jim and to lesser extent Francis and people like Alex Rich believed that you would understand protein synthesis by doing the structure of RNA. And they had started to generate… to try and do this for RNA that had been done for DNA, and of course they were completely wrong. It never worked out that way. But that is what was believed, and that is what Jim was trying to do in Cal Tech at the time, and that is organise… organise that. I believed that what we had to go is from the genetics. To me that was the open door. You get genes, you make mutants, you study it, and as happened later, you know, genetics just turned out to be the poor man's way of doing the DNA sequence, or the man's way of doing it with… with his hands tied behind his back. As we will see from the... the plan that failed, basically, later on.

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