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Sydney Brenner - Forming a territorial army (30/236)

463 views · Published 5 July 2017 · 1:22 · Indexed 26 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: I should also say that I also spent… I was also in the army at this time. In fact, what had happened was, as part of the war effort, the university students and the medical students had formed something that was a… like the territorial army – that is, a kind of weekend army – as part of this, and in fact there was the… the whole of the Johannesburg Medical School had formed a field ambulance. I think it was called the 25th Field Ambulance, and in fact there were two full-time soldiers that actually occupied offices in the medical school, and the head of the ambulance was Professor Dart, who had the rank of colonel and then all the other lecturers in the medical school had different ranks. In fact, a very old friend of mine, John Robinson, who was a medical student a little bit ahead of me; he was very famous as the man who broke down when we went on our annual three week camp and was sent home in… in tears.

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