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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: At the time then there was a… other people had begun to work on this RNA being made after phage infection and in fact there was a paper in which it had been suggested that this new RNA was in fact found in the presence of a small number of new ribosomes, and that got published later, and that everything was all right. Following… at the same time people working in Paris – this would be François Jacob and Jacques Monod – had come to realise that one could… one needed something special to explain enzyme induction. They had been studying the kinetics of enzyme induction after you add the gene to a cell and found that this happened extremely rapidly, and in fact by using various inhibitors they produced a number of alternatives, all of which just seemed quite strange. For example one of their alternatives was that the DNA for these enzymes made protein directly. There was no intermediate. But they were… they seemed to have excluded the possibility that new ribosomes were made to carry this, or if they were, they were a very small fraction and again capable of prodigious synthesis.

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