{"id":96,"date":"2013-10-22T16:10:34","date_gmt":"2013-10-22T16:10:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blueskiesbenchspace.org\/blog\/?p=96"},"modified":"2013-11-14T17:49:01","modified_gmt":"2013-11-14T17:49:01","slug":"chapter-1-all-the-things-i-didnt-know-about-molecular-biology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blueskiesbenchspace.org\/blog\/?p=96","title":{"rendered":"All the things I didn’t know about molecular biology"},"content":{"rendered":"

Until I started writing Blue Skies and Bench Space<\/em>, I was horrendously ignorant about the history of molecular biology. Like everyone who did a PhD at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, I walked up and down staircases lined with photos of the great and the good, and shared a canteen with even more of the field\u2019s superstars.

\"Nobel<\/a>

Some Nobel laureates of the LMB<\/p><\/div><\/p>\n

Sydney Brenner, Max Perutz and Aaron Klug were familiar features of the landscape, but while I could see they were brilliant and very alarming, I didn\u2019t really know what Aaron had won his Nobel Prize for, or that Sydney was one of the fathers of molecular biology and had worked with everyone who was anyone. I did know about Max\u2019s Nobel Prize, as I\u2019d had some lectures on him when I was an undergraduate, but his habits of eating blackened bananas and never sitting down seemed far more interesting than his work as a crystallographer. In fact, during my four years at the LMB, I am sorry to say that my only interaction with any of them was when Max refused to sign a petition I\u2019d got up to protest about sexist adverts in Nature<\/a>, and Sydney asked me who I was in a lift. Pathetic. I wish I could say I was too absorbed in my highly complex work, but to be honest, I spent most of my work hours mindlessly sequencing DNA and analysing mRNA, and most of the rest of my time falling in and out of pubs. <\/p>\n

\"Some<\/a>

Some PhD students of the LMB<\/p><\/div>\n

Thanks to my wasted youth, when I began researching what eventually became Chapter 2 of Blue Skies and Bench Space<\/em>, I uncovered a yawning gap in my knowledge. I knew that the work which had come out of the 5th floor of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund Labs (as the London Research Institute was known in those days) in the 1970s was terribly important, because everyone said so, but I had no idea why. My attempts to belatedly educate myself now comprise Chapter 1<\/a>, which I hope will fulfill the same function for anyone else in the same boat.<\/p>\n

Getting into the history of molecular biology has been one of the most satisfying things I\u2019ve ever done. Like an amateur genealogist hunting for famous relatives, I got terribly excited when the penny suddenly dropped that the research I was going to write about at the ICRF was in a direct line of descent from the earliest attempts to study genes at the molecular level, and what was more, there were recordings of the pioneers of the field talking about their work. And what an amazing bunch they were! If you have a few minutes (or better still, hours!) to spare, take a trawl through the Caltech oral histories<\/a> and the similar Cold Spring Harbor<\/a> resource, and listen to Max Delbr\u00fcck and his friends and colleagues talking about how they changed the molecular world. <\/p>\n

My own particular favourite recording comes from a different, and even more beguiling source: Web of Stories<\/a> is a treasure trove of recordings of the great and the good and the not so good, not just from science, but in just about any walk of life. Renato Dulbecco, who died in 2012 two days short of his 98th birthday, was interviewed in 2005 by Italian journalist Paola De Paoli Marchetti. The resulting videos are a total treat, partly because Dulbecco is impeccably elegant and very eloquent, but also because he speaks the most beautifully clear Italian I\u2019ve ever heard (and was helpfully subtitled!). This was wonderful, as at the time I found the recordings, I was doing beginners\u2019 Italian classes and had come to the conclusion that the only Italian I would ever understand was that spoken by my non-Italian fellow students.

\"Colonel<\/a>

Colonel James G Boswell, shingles sufferer and first funder of the eukaryotic molecular biology revolution<\/p><\/div>If you have similar issues with Italian, I urge you to watch this clip<\/a> of Dulbecco talking about how he started working on the animal viruses that were to set the whole field of eukaryotic molecular biology in motion. Actually, you should watch it anyway, as it\u2019s great.<\/p>\n

\"Lionel<\/a>

Lionel Crawford and Renato Dulbecco showing a blue-blooded visitor round the ICRF<\/p><\/div>The other thing that came as a big surprise to me as I got deeper into the subject was the strength of the links between the ICRF in London and the Cold Spring Harbor Labs on Long Island. I knew that there was a lot of traffic between the two places, but hadn\u2019t realise that the links stretched right back to when Jim Watson first became Cold Spring Harbor\u2019s Director, and had been forged between Watson and Michael Stoker, the ICRF Director of the same era, and Stoker\u2019s second-in-command, Lionel Crawford. The Cold Spring Harbor Archives contain a treasure trove of letters to and from Jim Watson and his two London colleagues, mostly about mundanities, but with the occasional interesting nugget. One I stumbled on was from Watson to Lionel Crawford, about the book that was to become The Double Helix<\/em>:
\n

\"From<\/a>

From the Cold Spring Harbor archives, dated 27th September 1966<\/p><\/div><\/p>\n

Disappointingly, when I checked on this potential relative with Lionel, he told me \u201cThe letter from Jim makes clear what he wanted from me and, as he says, \u201c if my memory is correct … \u201c In most cases it was, but not in this case.\u201d Barrington-Brown, even though he was not related to Lionel’s wife Elizabeth, must have been contacted, as his photo appeared in The Double Helix<\/em>, and went on to become one of the most famous science portraits in history. You can read about Barrington-Brown and how he came to be photographing Watson and Crick here<\/a>. Sadly, the piece is one of the many obituaries that came out after he was killed in a car crash in 2012.<\/p>\n

One person that I would have loved to have interviewed for Chapter 1, and indeed several other chapters, was the ICRF\u2019s former Director Sir Michael Stoker, but it was not to be. By the time I got in contact with his family, Sir Michael was too frail to talk to me, and in August of this year, he too died<\/a> at the age of 95. Of all the people who appear in Blue Skies and Bench Space<\/em>, he alone commanded universal respect and affection in everyone who spoke about him. He was a very good scientist, a great Director who reshaped the ICRF into a world-class research environment, and by all accounts, a thoroughly nice man.

\"Sir<\/a>

Sir Michael Stoker in 2002<\/p><\/div><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Until I started writing Blue Skies and Bench Space, I was horrendously ignorant about the history of molecular biology. Like everyone who did a PhD at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, I walked up and down staircases lined with photos of the great and the good, and shared a canteen with even more […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blueskiesbenchspace.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blueskiesbenchspace.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blueskiesbenchspace.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blueskiesbenchspace.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blueskiesbenchspace.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=96"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/blueskiesbenchspace.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":137,"href":"https:\/\/blueskiesbenchspace.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/96\/revisions\/137"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blueskiesbenchspace.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=96"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blueskiesbenchspace.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=96"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blueskiesbenchspace.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=96"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}