Words matter. These are the best Sydney Brenner Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
During this period, I became interested in how the new techniques of cloning and sequencing DNA could influence the study of genetics and I was an early and active proponent of the Human Genome Sequencing Project.
He told me that Francis Crick and Jim Watson had solved the structure of DNA, so we decided to go across to Cambridge to see it. This was in April of 1953.
I went in with Jack and Leslie, into this room that was lined with brick, and there on the side I can remember very clearly was this small model with plates for the bases – the original model with everything screwed together.
Living most of the time in a world created mostly in one’s head, does not make for an easy passage in the real world.
I think peer review is hindering science. In fact, I think it has become a completely corrupt system. It’s corrupt in many ways, in that scientists and academics have handed over to the editors of these journals the ability to make judgment on science and scientists.
I sometimes say I am the extinguished professor, because what I’d really like to be is the postdoc, to have that kind of thinking. I think one can get very set in his ways with titles like ‘distinguished professor.’
The moment I saw the model and heard about the complementing base pairs I realized that it was the key to understanding all the problems in biology we had found intractable – it was the birth of molecular biology.
I completed the first three years of primary school in one year and was admitted to the local school the age of six directly into the fourth year, some two years younger than all my contemporaries.
There’s no exploration anymore, except in a very few places.
The modern computer hovers between the obsolescent and the nonexistent.
The supporters now, the bureaucrats of science, do not wish to take any risks. So in order to get it supported, they want to know from the start that it will work.
I set up a laboratory in the Department of Physiology in the Medical School in South Africa and begin to try to find a bacteriophage system which we might use to solve the genetic code.
The most important thing today is for young people to take responsibility, to actually know how to formulate an idea and how to work on it. Not to buy into the so-called apprenticeship.
In my second year, after moving to the Medical School, I began the courses of Anatomy and Physiology. I had begun to see that I was interested in cells and their functions.
The art of doing science is doing the important things first.
I also became interested in chemistry and gradually accumulated enough test tubes and other glassware to do chemical experiments, using small quantities of chemicals purchased from a pharmacy supply house.
I cannot stand all the people who take themselves very seriously, who cannot just laugh at themselves.
Many have gone on to do important scientific work but all remember those wonderful times when we and our science were young and our excitement in meeting new challenges knew no bounds.
I lived at home and I cycled every morning to the railway station to travel by train to Johannesburg followed by a walk to the University, carrying sandwiches for my lunch and returning in the evening the same way.
The thing I’m most interested in is the nervous system. How do brains grow? How do genes build complicated nervous systems?
