Abstract

Ever since I can remember, I liked to take things to bits to see how they work. My parents thought that this trait was not to be encouraged when applied to living animals, so diverted my attention to things mechanical and electronic. I was given the use of a shed in the garden. This became my beloved workshop where I made bombs, rockets, and radios. After one of my bombs caused a local scare, my activities were restricted to electronics. On finishing school, I worked in a factory for a time and then progressed onto a couple of other jobs in industrial development labs on the basis of my self-taught skills in electronics. Eventually, I got a job as an electronics technician in the Medical Research Council's labs in Mill Hill (MRC National Institute for Medical Research, Mill Hill, London, UK). It was here that I got my first (ethical) exposure to biology. I developed a voltage clamp apparatus for neurophysiological research, a project that piqued my curiosity about nervous systems. I also developed a computer system for displaying 3D images of molecular structures. The MRC encouraged and supported me to study for a physics degree at Brunel University. However, after I graduated in 1969, there seemed no good career path where I could pursue my developing interest in computers in the lab where I was working, so I sought and obtained a job offer from industry. However, my boss at the MRC Mill Hill lab encouraged me to check out the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge where he had heard there was a new research initiative to use computers to study the nervous system of a worm. So, mainly out of a sense of duty to the MRC for having supported me though my undergraduate studies, I donned my best (and only) suit and headed off to Cambridge.

Highlights

  • Getting into the mind of a worm—a personal view of nervous systems

  • It soon became apparent that this atmosphere was prevalent in the Cell Biology Division, which was jointly headed by Sydney and Francis Crick at the time

  • I remember that, having described the organism, he spoke of an insurmountable barrier to the study of metazoans—biochemistry. He illustrated this with a bell-shaped curve on the blackboard. He turned to the audience with his bushy eyebrows twitching with mischief and, with a theatrical flourish, drew a line through the bottom of the curve saying: “with genetics, we will tunnel through this barrier”

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Summary

Sydney Brenner

Sydney is the most intellectually seductive person I have ever encountered. I was entranced by the possibility of obtaining a circuit diagram of a nervous system and using this to figure out how it works and assembles itself. He turned to the audience with his bushy eyebrows twitching with mischief and, with a theatrical flourish, drew a line through the bottom of the curve saying: “with genetics, we will tunnel through this barrier” In this manner the Pied Piper attracted a series of outstanding American postdoctoral fellows to work on the C. elegans project. For Sydney, he wanted a genetically tractable organism with a simple body plan that would facilitate detailed anatomical reconstructions from electron micrographs To this end, he was fortunate in obtaining the services of an outstanding electron microscopist, Nichol Thomson. He became skilled at cutting long unbroken series of sections, a critical skill that allowed us to reconstruct the nervous system He had been working with Sydney since the mid 1960s and they had found that C. elegans gave the nicest images of all the nematode species they examined. Not long after I arrived, he dropped his anatomical reconstructions and moved on to pastures anew

Nichol Thomson
John White and the Modular I
Eileen Southgate
Full Text
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