Sydney Brenner British Quotations

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.

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.

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.

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.

My Uncle Harry had given me a microscope as a present which allowed me to continue my personal explorations of the living world.

My parents were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe; my father came to South Africa from Lithuania in 1910, my mother, from Latvia, in 1922.

My parents would have preferred me to become a surgeon or a physician but were most understanding of the ambitions of their son.

I spent 20 years sharing an office with Francis Crick and many new and exciting ideas (both right and wrong) were generated from our conversations.

In my final year I failed Medicine, scraped through Surgery but got a First Class in the third subject, Obstetrics and Gynecology.

I immediately began to read about bacterial viruses and in October 1952 I arrived in Oxford to do a Ph.D. in the Physical Chemistry Laboratory.