John Sulston interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 16th September 2008

0:09:07 Born in Fulmer, Buckinghamshire, in 1942; during the War we lived at Chesham Bois with my grandmother; father was an Anglican priest and was away in Africa; my mother had been a teacher before my birth; I have had a very particular relationship with my father in the sense that I have diverged totally from him; I was brought up as an Anglican, was a server in the church, and really tried hard to be a believer; it was an important part of our relationship and he was anxious to pass on his philosophy to me; he might well have become an academic but chose to go into the church and he expected me to do well; my memory of our relationship (he died in 1986) is completely coloured by the later part when I had to break away from him; in my teenage years I became agnostic, and before long, atheist, in the Cambridge way - rationalist, humanist, atheism is where I have ended up; he found it distressing that I took this course; when I came up to Cambridge I remember discussing religion with fellow students and found that very few understood how important it was to me to be or not to be religious; for me it was the only thing that mattered, a lesson in how one's own experience colours one's priorities; my father was a middle to high Anglican; he was assistant priest in the local parish at weekends, but during the week worked in London as a secretary at the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel which later merged with the Church Missionary Society; he had little experience himself of missionary work though he did visit mission stations that they ran

4:41:23 Agree with Richard Dawkin's view that the Education Officer of the Royal Society should not be a clergyman; think the appointment of Michael Reiss was ill-advised; it is such a particular position in this age, especially given the situation in America, with the belief in creationism rising in this country; how  we deal with that is unclear; Michael Reiss is trying to damp it, but my reasoning on what is going on in America, and the way that the intelligent design people behave, is that you have to make your opposition rather clearer than he is doing; if someone says that two and two make five you have to say clearly that they don't; I think the fairy stories that all religions wrap round the fact of evolution are wrong so oppose Michael Reiss's tolerance of them, especially as Education Officer; if he were a Fellow it would be alright, but as an Officer he would have to be careful; Martin Rees is a very spiritual man but you don't find him speaking in this fashion; he describes himself as an unbelieving Anglican and this resonates to me as I spent my teenage years in that form; it is a matter of respecting the institution whilst not accepting all its tenets; think it is a tragedy that Anglicanism is declining in this country and that various evangelical sects are becoming more powerful; Anglicanism is one of the great secular religions, and always has been since the Reformation; I would not act as spiritual as Martin does in his statements as I find this conflicting; Tim Hunt has said that whilst in biology we are dealing with very clear facts, cosmologists are touching the void; it drives some of them a little mad and makes others a little spiritual; they are touching things way beyond our comprehension, much more than biology, so you can understand the difference in attitude; I have refused to have this conversation with all the newspapers as I feel it is an internal matter for the Royal Society

11:44:14 Atheism is my position for my lifetime and I also label myself as a Humanist, which does provide the framework to live one's life honestly, morally and joyfully; if you have nothing you have no comfort; Humanism gives me comfort in the knowledge that I have a finite existence, I have very good reasons for acting in a moral fashion and feeling that my life is worthwhile as there will be other lives after it; that is my present framework - I see that we have enormous amounts to discover as a strategy for going forward as human beings; I believe atheism makes coherent sense; all the religions are in conflict with each other; they have different stories, based on insubstantial records, but justify them with saying that there was some direct communication with a deity in the past which has led them to this belief; I find those unconvincing, particularly because of the conflict; this was my main argument in discussions with my father; talking recently on the good that science can bring and the extraordinary advance and enlightenment that has occurred as a result of our discovery process; recent landmarks include the cosmological revolution, the Darwinian revolution, the discoveries of fundamental physics, which completely change the world view of humanity; I look at that story and say this is the way we should be going forward, these are the exciting things that have happened; science has had to fight established religions of all kinds in order to get them accepted and tolerated, and we are still fighting for the Darwinian one; consequently, I think that atheism is a terrific strategy both for me personally, and for humanity

15:29:16 I am Chair of a new institute at Manchester on ethics and science; the University has a strategy of recruiting existing Nobel prize winners part-time, frankly to bolster their position academically; my particular sphere involves the fulltime Director, John Harris, who is a bioethicist; he holds views on the enhancement of humanity which I partly accept; this is a good partnership; we have the opportunity for expansion though there is an existing group of philosophers and lawyers but I want to expand into social and policy areas; my counterpart there in Economics is Joseph Stiglitz, a humanist economist, and we have a great opportunity to do things together; he has a counterpart called the Brooks World Poverty Institute; I am really looking forward to these collaborations; see it as a platform by which, even in my part-time position, I can have some bearing on research, and maybe influence in policy matters which I think is important

17:50:03 Richard Dawkin is deliberately setting himself against the intelligent design crowd who have seized on the idea that the theory of evolution is uncertain; the fact is that creationism and all other religious doctrines are also theories but they are alleged to be facts; this is purely terminology as I see it; if we find that people are treating our theories, which are actually extremely substantial, as just theories, and their own very insubstantial theories as facts, one has to adjust the terminology; I have not thought enough about how one does that, but I ought to

19:54:18 Did a tiny amount of reading on other religions when I was a student, and did find a certain attraction to Buddhism; in the end I find it insubstantial compared with the extraordinary discoveries we have made by rational scientific approaches; I could come back to it; my atheism is provisional but don't see the comfort and inspiration of the humanist version running out before the end of my lifetime; the only sense in which I would be strongly evangelical is the responsibility to conduct rational policies that do not endanger the future of humanity; despite speculations, we have no shred of evidence that any other life form exists, certainly no intelligent life form; I think we should treat ourselves collectively as very precious; I am extremely opposed to those evangelical philosophies or policies attributed to the Bush administration who use religion, in some degree, as a cloak for very aggressive and dangerous practices in world policy

22:46:09 My mother was my confidant and my rock as I was growing up; I could come home from school and talk; she had been a teacher of English at Watford Grammar School for Girls; throughout the time I was losing my links with my father over religion, my mother was always the neutral party; although she clearly was a believer and strongly supported my father she never indicated to me that she thought I was going off the rails as he did; she was the go-between; the most extraordinary event was that after her death, among her possessions was a letter to me saying how sad she was that I had lost my faith and her hope that one day I would regain it; it shocked me, it was a second bereavement, as here was this person who I had thought of as being at the unbelieving end of Anglicanism, and I had disappointed her; I have a sister who is four years younger; we never had a strong relationship but a happy childhood; we laugh rather bitterly now that I, as the boy, was sent to fee-paying private schools and she was sent to state schools; I did get scholarships throughout so did not take large chunks of the family income

26:38:21 First went to a preparatory school not far from the house called York House; by then we had moved to Rickmansworth in Hertfordshire, to an area called Mill End; it was not a top flight school but the sort of place that you might succeed on your own; can remember no particular teacher having any influence; strongly suspect that my mother was the most important educator through those years; we were taught to read long before we went to school so was ahead of the game; I was a slightly precocious individual as I was always young for my year; from the time I was able to I took things to pieces, I loved playing with electricity, though my parents had no idea what was going on; my sister was also interested in experimenting with electricity; I had an aquarium, dipped in the pond, an uncle gave me a little microscope, had a chemistry set and tried to make explosions, and was interested in balloons, cranes and Meccano, everything, from the earliest years; more manipulative than is common except among those who become practical bench scientists; I have been hands on throughout my career; the least manipulative stage was when I was doing the cell lineage of Caenorhabditis; however, simply handling the worms there were a lot of gimmicks and tricks, which is why I was successful; after that was over I came back to biochemistry and started working on genomes and I was just manipulating throughout until I finally stepped away from the bench in about 2003 when we had finished the nematode genome; like John Gurdon who always did the injections himself, I did the same with DNA cloning; I was doing that and was full-time Director of the Sanger Centre at Hinxton and full-time doing the worm cloning, in fact doing two jobs and working that hard; there are professions, particularly bioinformatics, where they are not manipulating except on the computer screen mathematically; one connection which people are pushing quite hard on is experiencing molecules as objects, to the extent of having walk-in rooms; not sure if that is not just a failure of imagination; mathematicians spend their lives visualizing things without such aids; do look with dismay at schools which are junking a lot of the hands-on squishy biology that we all did; I can't see any real justification, and no health and safety issues, provided you take a few elementary precautions 

36:12:03 After preparatory school I went to Merchant Taylors School at Sandy Lodge, within cycling distance of home; I went there because I got a scholarship that paid most of the fees; I, like most of the boys, was a day boy, for which I was glad as my world was a private one in my workshop in my bedroom at home; I was always terribly homesick when away on exchange visits, so glad I was not a boarder; it was a good school; they had a linked scholarship to Cambridge to Pembroke College; at school had an absolute loathing of competitive sport and bored by history etc.; all I wanted to do was science; I never had any skill at music; the music in my life now comes from Daphne, my wife, who is quite a good pianist and plays the clarinet; my parents did listen to classical music and I listened to Radio Luxemburg, but I was never a musician; it does not directly input to my work, but what does is the waking dream; now, though my bench days are behind me, I do wake thinking of ways of expressing something I have to say in a speech which have eluded be before; I keep a pad beside my bed to write thoughts down immediately on waking; drink, in moderation, also releases thoughts; have found walking on a high ridge, alone, also frees thought; I work best in the morning; find it now hard to find time to get away on holiday with Daphne; one advantage with walking is that one can disconnect, go offline, but always have a scrap of paper and pencil

47:00:17 At Merchant Taylors there were some good teachers; one, Lloyd, was particularly inspirational for me; later, at a Sixth Formers' gathering found that other people had the same impression of him; he was a crazy sort of person; on one occasion he started a fire while demonstrating in physics; he opened the cosmos to me by showing how by physical and mathematical thought one could reach out in space and time; other teachers too pushed me hard and tried to challenge me and I challenged them at times; parents were quite keen that I went to Oxbridge; came to Cambridge to read natural sciences; at the time I thought physiology would be interesting but it had not moved into its later more fascinating phase by that time; in the end I found Ian Fleming, my supervisor in organic chemistry, quite inspirational as they were excited by models and predictive theories for what electrons were doing in organic molecules as they reacted; found it very exciting, like Meccano, and organic chemistry is like that; I decided to do organic chemistry in my third year; it turned out well as it is a good foundation, learning about molecules; I have to confess that I did not enjoy being an undergraduate here; I was rather shy and socially distressed, particularly by the lack of girls; more importantly, I just didn't like learning; the thing that carried me through all the way was working with my fingers; there were practicals, but they formed a small part with most of the course learning; for most kids who have been bright at school, coming to Cambridge is a pretty shocking experience because you are no longer the big fish in the little pool; so they were lean years for me with not a lot of comfort, but a few drinking companions; Dean Dewey was my Tutor at Pembroke and a sympathetic man, though I didn't understand him at all; in the first year I coasted; in the second year I joined the ADC and took up theatre lighting; I was never on stage but it is exciting; Miriam Margolyes was my contemporary, and it was a fantastic period for Cambridge drama; I was in awe of them, but lighting was also creative and enormous fun; unfortunately it took much time and I began to slither down academically and didn't do at all well at the end of my second year; both Dewey and my parents talked to me and I determined to learn enough in my third year and scraped a 2:1 which was enough then to become a graduate student; because of the whole atmosphere I decided to drop out and do VSO; would have gone to Africa, and don't know what might have happened if I had gone, but the money dried up on the scheme and I had nothing to do; wandered along and got an interview with Alexander Todd who had enough space for me; Todd was the Professor of Organic Chemistry and had made his name through the elucidation of nucleotide structure and had set up a school of chemistry and was hugely important behind the discoveries of Crick and Watson in deciphering the structure of DNA; I was assigned a supervisor, Colin Reese, who became my mentor for the next two years on the synthesis of oligonucleotides, linking together, at the most basic level, the individual components of nucleic acid; Dan Brown was his contemporary and I still have a very good friend who worked with Dan at the same bench; Colin and the situation changed my life because suddenly I was put in the situation where I didn't have to do any book learning; I was back in my teenage workshop where I could explore chemical reactions; of course, if you do that you find things; there was also a good discussion group among the research students in the laboratory in Lensfield Road; I was enjoying Cambridge not in the sense of the Colleges but in the sense of the science

Second Part

0:09:07 Leslie Orgel, an ex-Cambridge theoretical chemist, was well known to people here and it was somewhat routine for people to suggest to their graduate students that they might like to do a post-doc. with Leslie in California; the connection with Leslie was that he was working on prebiotic chemistry, on chemical reactions that might have some bearing on the origin of life; fitted perfectly with things that I had been doing so I was hired as a post-doc.; it was great fun for me as I was now catapulted out of a situation where I was really working for Colin to a place where I was expected to work on my own, but nevertheless treated as a close discussant by Leslie; I got quite a lot of invitations to his house to meet visiting scholars

1:48:02 Did meet Paul Dirac through Daphne and Monica, his daughter; he was quite a retiring figure but I got to know him better because he discovered I could fix radios; he was intellectually in a different world from me; in California, had a wonderful time, my daughter was born there; Leslie was based in the Salk Institute; when Jonas Salk produced the first polio vaccine with charitable money, the success of the vaccine drew in more funds, so an institute was started in his name; it stands on a cliff edge just north of San Diego, a beautiful spot; they then started to appoint Fellows, like Leslie, and visiting scholars like me; Leslie actually encouraged me to apply for a permanent Fellowship there after coming back to Cambridge, but we decided to stay here; Leslie, a friend of Francis Crick and Sydney Brenner, knew that Brenner was looking for staff to expand his work on nematode; Leslie arranged that I should come back to Cambridge for a year or so to learn from Sydney's work; having got here and started to work on this worm, we got settled into Cambridge and found we rather liked it, so never did go back to the Salk; at that time, for family reasons, we felt it would be good to stay in England; our parents were here, and we had a second child; if there had not been opportunities I might have found it tougher to get a job, but  the expanding Laboratory of Molecular Biology meant that we were able to stay; later on we did not like the increase in neo-liberal trends in America; ironically, our daughter, having been born in California, is a dual citizen, and she went back to America and was a research student in Berkeley; after getting her Ph.D. she lived in America and has now settled in Vancouver with her husband, out of America again; there is quite a lot of feeling in the family about American politics and where one actually wants to live; a bit silly of course as every country has all  sorts of people; fair to say that I am a left-winger, perhaps a reaction to my parents who expected me to help with the Conservative Party; I have moved steadily to the left throughout my life; I have probably been urged in this by Daphne who is a very staunch left-winger; basically Labour Party supporters but we are both extremely uncomfortable with the Blairite trend of New Labour; as a pragmatic issue we both vote pretty consistently Lib-Dem because there is absolutely zero hope of getting a Labour candidate in South Cambridgeshire where we are; the City is different, but outside is extremely conservative

8:15:41 What really worries me about America is its foreign policy; its role as the leading imperial power has been exacerbated by the end of the Cold War; our comment about New Labour is that it enthusiastically joined in with the most recent adventures, and I regard these as the most dangerous things going on in the world today for the survival of humanity, both directly and indirectly because they make it more difficult to come to agreement over such things as climate change; I think we need to adopt a much more holistic view of international affairs than we do at the moment; America is doing nothing differently from what Britain did in its heyday as an imperial power; there certainly would be additional domestic discomfort in living in parts of America where there are fights over the teaching of evolution in schools; perhaps the most important thing is lifestyle; in this country we still tend to regard people not by how much they earn, or how much they visibly spend; there is still a sense of asceticism here; however, we have lots of friends in America and could have settled there; just an explanation of the way one makes major decisions based on trivial balances of considerations; most of all we regard ourselves as citizens of the world; I went to Japan a few times at the beginning and have been to China a couple of times recently to do with the genome; went to India once; have just agreed to be on the advisory board of a foundation set up by a Thai princess, and have visited there once to give a talk; persuaded to do this by David Weatherall who is also on the board; notice a trend nowadays that people not only ask you directly to do something but find someone they think you might admire to write also; think that China will be increasingly important; the Chinese Academy of Sciences and their funders now understand that it is no good just sending Chinese abroad because if they are bright they will stay there and make careers outside China; what you have to do is to establish centres of excellence within the country and attract them back again, and foreigners also; on my first visit to China where Georgina Ferry and I were launching our book, 'The Common Thread', the story of events around the human genome, I encouraged this idea; whether or not they continue to fund them in an open way to do seriously new things and get their much craved Nobel prize etc., or whether this will be driven into utilitarian matters, I don't know; think they will probably do both; India is already doing this, though it does not care about equality, and very good research is going on; South Korea is quite desperate to move forward in this way; in Singapore, where Sydney Brenner is involved, already see themselves as a hub in the area; so all sorts of important initiatives which will lead to more high quality work in future

15:04:47 Max Perutz was head of the MRC when I arrived; Sydney was joint head with Francis Crick of the cell biology division which I joined; Sydney was also keen to expand his group working on the nematode worm; there was some scepticism that anything new would come from this work; those working with drosophilae were scornful as they thought they had a very good model already and saw no point introducing another; it was not wholly new; there was a lab in France which was also working on this little worm; just remarkable that when Sydney came to work on it personally with a couple of assistants for five years, he just completely revolutionized what was going on and turned this thing into a powerful model; he began to attract post-docs who were very serious about making big careers; Bob Horvitz, with whom I shared the Nobel prize along with Sydney, was not one of those who would work on anything that was not going to deliver something important in science; I was much more of a casual recruit; I could see there were potentials but was not making such as serious decision as Bob Horvitz; from 1965 when Sydney picked up this almost unknown animal deliberately as a new model for developmental biology, working on the genetics, cutting sections; Nichol Thomson who used to work for Lord Rothschild then moved to work with Sydney as an electron microscopist and Muriel Rigby as his assistant in the genetics lab, just this little group put together this really convincing set of mutations and hints about why these mutations should be important in development; Sydney was hugely charismatic; for a long time I got along fine because I was very low key with no ambition; I was a bench monkey; the people with ambition, like Horvitz, were going off to start their own labs; I was no threat to Sydney and worked along quietly and got things done, though in the 1970's I increasingly felt that I was not getting enough done; looking back, can see that I was doing a lot, but by the end of the 1970's I was looking elsewhere; I am something of a depressive, I suppose, in scientific life; it has often occurred to me that I am rather unusual in working out of depression, I have achieved most of what I have achieved always out of a pit of despair; that was how I got my 2:1 and the cell lineage of the embryo achieved; why couldn't I do those things and be cheerful at the same time? The down and out syndrome allows you to take the slightly larger step than you thought you were capable of; it is characteristic of relationships with Sydney, whom I admire enormously,  that he finds it very hard to let things go; he was hugely supportive and I depended on him very much throughout the 1970's; when it came to doing my own thing, at first it was good but then we began to diverge; my own thing was working on genomes as a whole; it wasn't sequencing because the Fred technique was not automated fast enough at that stage, though later on the very same chemistry did become automated; what I am thinking of was mapping, where you break the genome; in the case of the nematode you have a set of pieces of DNA in total 100,000,000 nucleotides long; these have to be manipulated in some way in order to discover the genes so that you can work on them and find out what their individual bits of sequence are and then go on to do experiments; by the end of the 1970's people were desperate to do these; I had done the lineage work and we had all these lovely mutations, starting with Sydney, but then by lots of other people, all very interesting behaviourally, all affecting things like the cell lineage, the way the muscles work, the way the nervous system hooks up, all sorts of things, and we needed to get at the genes; it did hit me that I was going to work on the genome personally; it hit me at a Gordon Conference with Matt Scott who had done heroic work on the Antennapedia complex in Drosophila; it was fantastic work but all he had was just a little bit but we had a huge genome of other genes; thought that we should not just work on a bit of the genome but map the lot

23:24:00 People thought I was crazy; it turned out that one other person was doing exactly the same thing at the same time; that was Maynard Olson in Washington University, St Louis Missouri, who was thinking exactly the same things about yeast; my tremendous friend and colleague, Bob Waterston, who had also been a Sydney post-doc, had got a job at St Louis and was coming back from time to time on sabbatical; it so happened that as I began to do the map working with Alan Coulson, who had been liberated to work on this by Fred Sanger's retirement, Bob Waterston came over; he spent his sabbatical in our room and brought together some technology that Maynard Olson's lab had developed which fitted perfectly with what we were doing and allowed us to forge forward with the map; as a result of this connection I got to know Maynard a bit, and we both felt this negativity very much; the fly people thought it was a joke as they had it all sorted anyway; they had these very clever things called polytene chromosomes that actually give you a visual mapping of a barred pattern where genes were active and inactive and allows them to dissect out the genes in a more direct way; what we did was to lay out the nematode genome on a piece of filter paper in spot so that it was exactly equivalent to their polytene chromosomes, so we produced what I call the polytene filters by the end of the 1980's for the nematode; the whole thing was very successful, it really launched the nematode forward, all the genes started to be discovered, and people were absolutely delighted; we were made, we were now a fully-fledged genomic organism; soon after that, when we moved into the sequencing process in the early 1990's that the fly began to get uneasy because it realized that not only had we this powerful worm tool, but we had the spots and you could pick any of them out and manipulate them directly; then we were going ahead and sequencing the whole thing and the fly, in this long-standing competition, was beginning to lose post-docs to the worm because the worm was so powerful, both in the interest of its developmental biology and in the tools to deal with it; eventually Gerry Rubin took the bull by the horns and initiated the genome project for the fly, and the two got sequenced

28:19:53 Interesting to reflect on these little competitions because they are no bad thing; the so called model organisms are modelling two things - the politically incorrect view is that they are modelling the human, and from the medical point of view that is what they are about, but they also model organisms for biology in the sense that these are areas that you can manipulate particular aspects and look at the signals and controls that are being used; there is an important reason for using the word model is that the mechanisms you discover tend to be applicable far beyond the confines of the particular organism because, of course, we have a tremendous unity of life through the process of evolution, and the way things actually work; interesting to see how the competition between the two models impelled people on to do new things rather than just coasting

29:37:52 So by the early 1990's Bob Waterston and I with our groups were beginning to sequence the nematode which we published in 1998; during that process we became involved with the human genome; in my case it was because we needed space; the Medical Research Council was funding the worm process and was just about able to afford it, though it was a lot of money for them; through  Jim Watson I was invited to become Director of a new institute which we eventually called the Sanger Centre, after Fred, which would tackle some or all of the human genome; this was in 1992; I saw this as a Faustian contract; I didn't really want to get involved with the human genome but to continue with worm, but this was the way to get space; partly in parallel with that, Bob Waterston was being expanded by the National Institutes of Health who were his funders in America, also to take an interest in the human genome; this flowed on and during this we became aware of Craig Venter who initially was a colleague who had his own lab at NIH; he got fed up and moved out and started the Institute for Genome Research which was partly industrially and partly state funded; at that point the public/private began to intrude because it turned out that he had some kind of commitment to Smith Kline Beecham via Bill Heseltine's outfit called Human Genome Sciences - it is all very complex, I am just describing a little bit of corporate America, a chain of contracts which meant that Craig was now much more required to give people first refusal; at that stage he was not terribly interested in the large sequencing, and rather decried it as did Sydney; Sydney always said that it was a complete waste of time to sequence whole genomes; what you needed to do was to get hold of the genes through the cDNA process and in that he was in agreement with Venter; this went on for a while but we were all supposed to be colleagues together until suddenly in 1998 Venter announced that he was going to make a run for the human genome in a new company which became Celera, and he was going to outrun the international consortium as it now was, working on the human genome project; we were substantial stakeholders, slightly larger were the Americans, Bob Waterston and Eric Lander and a number of other labs in America; I thought that having an international consortium on something as philosophically important as the human genome was a really good one; I dislike the idea of even one country working on it let alone one corporation; however Celera was going further, they wanted to make this a paying operation, the money was being invested not coincidentally by the company that made our sequencing machines, which was now called Perkin Elmer  which bought the original spinout, Applied Biosystems, who had decided, under the influence of Tony White, that they would invest not only in the machines but in the product that the machines produced; they would get the human genome, patent it in large measure, and run it as a paying database; at this point I go into my standard talk about the scientific social economy and how things ought to work; if you try to put a very important chunk of knowledge, such as the human genome, into a database which is private and can only be accessed for fees, then you have to put a very significant criterion on that in the contract that those who access the database may not redistribute the data; this means that people cannot talk about an extraordinarily important piece of information in any sensible way; the people who propose this sort of technique, and Celara was not unique, would say that for academic purposes they could let you talk, but of course they can't, and in the end it has to be secret otherwise you have no business plan; this to me was a thing to fight; it spilled over into the press and media on both sides of the Atlantic, most incredibly obnoxious things were said; in the end it was resolved by a pact being drawn at a rather high level by the Wellcome Trust and NIH arranging that there would be an agreed draw; we couldn't stop them sequencing and there was very great danger that they would persuade the American tax payers that NIH should not fund the American public domain to sequence any more; of course, they would have a very strong case because American industry should not be competed with by an American government agency; that was my reason for coming out in a much more full-blooded way than I really wanted to, to say why I thought it was so important to keep this data public; in the end it was so tough, it was election year for Clinton, and so our high level diplomats arranged an announcement by Clinton and Blair that the human genome had been achieved and that Craig should be given his due etc.; Craig Venter and Francis Collins as the head of the international project stood up in the White House and announced that the thing was done; it wasn't done at all, this was a premature conclusion, that part of the strategy of the Venter Celara outfit was that the genome would be done very roughly, just enough to get patent; we had to compete on the same ground otherwise we would have lost the patents to them and so we were drawn into producing what Francis Collins very cleverly called the rough draft of the genome; the actual human genome was finished in the public domain in 2003; it is still not absolutely complete because the bits at the centres of human chromosomes where they join on to the spindle when entering cell division, very repetitive and hard to sequence, are still being worked on but all the rest is done now and joined up; the information is in the public domain and everybody can use it, as is the mouse genome and many others; it is an extraordinarily important tool with which one can do comparative genomics which is the foundations of biology today; it is a huge success story on the public side; rather sadly is the way in which individual pieces of the human genome and other genomes are being patented and protected far too strongly, but that is a battle that will continue to be fought and will gradually fade out as the patents expire, and we move into a more subtle landscape where people are not patenting knowledge but patenting useful processes; it continues to be a most awful abuse of intellectual property in biotechnology today

40:13:50 This was not the work for which I was awarded the Nobel prize; I have argued in public and will continue to do so that this is not an appropriate area for the Nobel prize because there are far too many actors; my prize, along with Sydney and Bob Horvitz, was for the work we did beginning in the 1970's; my contribution is the discovery of the cell lineage, and in particular the study of cell deaths and how to look at them, along with some associated genetic work although most of that went into Bob Horvitz's lab at M.I.T.; they produced the story of the genes that control in this cascade process programmed cell death; it is something that is constantly mystifying to people; later today I am going down to celebrate with some fabric artists from St Martin's School on an M.R.C. funded project on fabrics inspired by our work; my particular connection is Carol Collet and she has been fascinated by programmed cell death and has made garden furniture that behaves in a similar way; Sydney inspired all of us and first started working on the worm at all

42:27:45 One of the small burdens to bear of a Nobel prize is that people actually write asking how to get a Nobel prize; my message is very simple that they should not think about the prize; you have to think about the science and enjoy it, and do something novel in it; in that way you will win as you will be enjoying your science, and you will be more likely to do good science, worthy of a prize; of course, there is a little bit of hypocrisy in it for me as I know very well that I have made progress very often when I am not enjoying it; but of course, as soon as I began to make progress I did enjoy it, so I suppose it is alright

44:02:55 Agree with the importance of getting things roughly right rather than precisely wrong; at the meeting I was just at I heard Wendy Hall of Southampton talk on her work in information technology, talking about her friend Tim Berners-Lee; she gave him credit for going the right way in inventing the World Wide Web; she said that at the time, she and her group were very involved in producing hyperlinks in a very precise way, all within one computer; Tim Berners-Lee said that it wouldn't work, you needed a scruffy approach where most of the links work, and you just let it scale; then you go round with some sort of search engine to tidy up links afterwards; this applies in all sorts of things; when we had our one and only weekend of management training at the Sanger Centre, the administrator there quite rightly noticed that when the institute grew larger than about fifty people there was tremendous distress among the staff, and by the time it got to one hundred, people were getting seriously upset; I couldn't understand this; my door was always open and I thought they could come and see me if they were upset, but of course they don't; what they want to have is a structure, a set of rules, so what we did to prepare for this was to go on a management training course; we learnt a huge amount in this one weekend from the facilitator; he gave us some sort of personality test and after analysing the results he went round each of us; when he came to me he said that I was the sort of person who gets there in the end and emerges out of a hedge backwards covered in broken glass; he was right

47:03:49 Pembroke gave me an Honorary Fellowship and I occasionally go there; I have no duties but when I can I go to feasts; Cambridge is a good place to do science but I don't think there is any particular mechanism that counts; bear in mind that all of my good fortune in getting anything done at all has not been in the University but in the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology; that is absolutely part of Cambridge but not part of the University; of course it has all sorts of formal links in terms of teaching; if you take the larger phenomenon, including these satellites, then there is no question that Cambridge is wonderful; it is mostly about critical mass, about the fact that when you have a number of bright people around then will find interesting things in one another's work that will spark off novel things between them; why was the  Laboratory of Molecular Biology so successful for so many years, I think our Nobel prizes were about the thirteenth in line, the reason is that they had a bunch of bright people to start with and they attracted other bright people coming through; they had a very strict rule about dead wood from the start so about two-thirds of the staff were transient; many post-docs coming through with their own agendas and eager to learn, so a real hothouse phenomenon; that is too much to take for most of us all our lives; the whole University has something of the same phenomenon with a constant stream of visitors who are attracted to the bright people there; the word for this nowadays is a centre of excellence; in looking to its future, Cambridge should think more about a centre of excellence based on the people and not worry too much about the mechanisms it uses; there is no doubt that the college system is helpful though not essential, but we should preserve it; it is nice to have a diversity of ways in which people can meet and discuss and you need different ways for different people; lots of people are not very social but they have much to contribute; they will probably not do well in the high table stuff but will do well in the chance of one to one  meetings; of course, we must be open, and if we want to continue as a great centre of research here in Cambridge and a great country for research in the UK, we must not be excessively grasping and utilitarian about what come out; of course we can have all the spinouts, there is no problem with that, but don't, as seems to be the trend at the moment, put them first and plan grant proposals around how many patents you hope to get out of it; in the humanities it is easy to say that is nonsense, in science it is a real trap and it is very possible that we will destroy our possible future with respect to places like China and India if we allow ourselves to be seduced down the utilitarian pathway; the important thing is that we are thinking about life, the universe and everything