Brenner’s kidding
South African biologist Sydney Brenner is a scientific icon of the “Golden Age” of molecular biology. The 2002 Nobel prize laureate was one of the first people to see the Watson-Crick model of the structure of DNA in 1953 (he was working at the nearby Oxford University’s Chemistry Department at that time). In the course of time, Brenner became one of the greatest biologists of the 20th century.
The man with the impressive eyebrows has made several epoch-making contributions to the emerging molecular biology in the 1960s (including the identification of mRNA, helping to elucidate the triplet nature of the genetic code regarding protein translation and frame shift mutations and establishing the soil roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans as a model organism for the investigation of animal development).
However, he is not only a leading researcher. Brenner is a humorous person, too (some even say he is a hopeless joker).
From January 1994 to December 2000 Brenner wrote a column for Current Biology, initially called Loose Ends
(renamed False Starts in 1998, when the column was moved from the back of the journal to the front). The entire set of Brenner’s pieces is available free via http://www.cell.com/current-biology/Brenner.
If you prefer the “living” Brenner, watch this interview from 23rd August 2007 with a good-humoured Brenner talking about why he had only dreamt of food for two years after he had come to the UK, how Watson & Crick killed all his joy and how science works like a medieval guild with journeyman and apprentices.
And if you are a synthetic biology aficionado, you should indulge in the following YouTube video, recorded in Oct 2008 at the Synthetic Biology 4.0 Conference at Hong Kong University (arranged by the BioBricks Foundation). It lasts 36 minutes but it’s worth it. Brenner is perpetually kidding the listening synthetic biology community (while philosophising on the reproduction of centaurs, on dragons and cookies, on the ‘Biofool’ industry, on human biofuel walking around on two legs etc.). - Enjoy!
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