Sydney Brenner - Scientific heroes (236/236)

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South African Sydney Brenner (1927-2019), who jointly discovered messenger RNA, was a pioneer in the field of genetics and molecular biology. He was one of three co-recipients of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. [Listener: Lewis Wolpert; date recorded: 1994]

TRANSCRIPT: [LW] Do you have scientific heroes?

Well, I… you ask whether I have scientific heroes and the answer is the… there are many people that I admire, both that I've known and that I've… and that I've read about. Von Neumann is a great scientific hero to me because it seemed… he seemed to have something. And of course it may be envy rather than admiration, but it's good to envy someone like von Neumann. Of course, I've always admired Francis Crick who, I think, has the brain that effectively always asked the right question, even though he never got the right answer, but he asked the right questions. I always had a soft spot and did admire Leó Szilárd, simply again because he kind of was this representative of a world that I felt I had some kind of connection to. I mean, growing up in South Africa with some connection to Europe makes… gives it a kind of fantastic background that one wants to grasp because one feels sort of in one's genes, so to speak, one is connected there. And of course one isn't really but it's that feeling of continuity and that, you know, that one thing when I met Leó Szilárd I said, God, he looks like one of my uncles, you know, the rich one. And… but nevertheless, it is the continuity to past worlds that I found fascinating. What I liked about Leó Szilárd was his complete obliviousness to the conventions and the criteria of this and his complete focus on what came out of his head and that I found was… was admirable.

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