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Sydney Brenner - Fred Sanger on the structure of insulin (84/236)

1,414 views · Published 5 July 2017 · 2:35 · Indexed 28 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: There's a club in Oxford called the Alembic Club which was for the discussion of chemistry, and I can remember – I think it must have been either late '53 or early '54 but certainly while I was at Oxford – of going to a lecture that was given by Fred Sanger and was on the structure of insulin, and he showed how he deduced the structure. I know he had a wonderful set of little blocks which he turned over to face the audience as he determined the little pieces of a structure, and the thing that struck me, because of course protein structure then was in a total impossible thing, and the thing that really impressed me was at the end of this lecture Sir Robert Robinson stood up and said the following. He said, 'Dr Sanger has made proteins part of chemistry. He's actually shown this remarkable fact that these things have a chemical structure in the form of their sequence of amino acids.' And until that time, you know, no one actually believed it. They all thought that they were polymers and things just joined together. There's something called the Bergmann-Niemann Hypothesis which said that things occurred with a frequency according to their abundance so they were repetitive structures, which of course you can't do very well because many things would come to occupy the same position so you can't have something that occurs every second position and another thing every third position, because what happens at position number six? You have a conflict. However, that was the state, and that I think was another signal achievement in pushing the subject on. But of course you see that again wasn't something that most people were doing, and Fred himself was always a fringe person in the biochemistry department here in Cambridge, and it's only when Fred left the biochemistry department and joined with us to go up the hill to make the Laboratory on Molecular Biology, but that'll come later.

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