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Sydney Brenner - The beginning of controversy in genetic manipulation (179/236)

199 views · Published 4 July 2017 · 2:10 · 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: Paul Berg came to the lab and he asked me about advice on an experiment that he was trying to do with SV40, which was the first genetic engineering experiment that was ultimately reported. And I said I thought it was very interesting and he should do it, but you know, why not do it with something simpler rather than with SV40, which was a tumour virus and so on. But he came to discuss with me not the nature of the experiment, but whether he ought to do the experiment, you know, whether it was the right thing to do. That was, if you like, the kind of opening scene onto what hit us in the middle of 1974 when all these experiments were reported at the... and we then had a huge... the beginnings of genetic manipulation and its problems. I immediately recognised this would be the way to tackle the genetics of higher organisms and I wanted to do it. I mean, the first thing you'll want to do is clone those goddam muscle genes. And of course it became very difficult to actually introduce this programme for the simple reason that it aroused this huge outcry about the moratorium and made us... well, at... it propelled me at least quite heavily into the more political work of trying to get all of this unlocked. Because this was the first time that I think there was an enormous confrontation between, so to speak, science and public interest and all of these other questions which we now live with, but which had exploded in a very big way at the time.

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