My Life in Science

  • Sydney Brenner
BioMed Central, 191 pp, $21.00; 2001 ISBN: 0954027809 | ISBN: 0-954-02780-9

When I was still a graduate student in physics, I was rummaging through journals in a library during the summer of 1962. I came across an article in an issue of Nature from 1961 that had as part of its astonishing text a statement that the genetic code for living systems was read in units of three (nucleotides). Aside from the obvious, that this sounded like a paper I should read, what amazed me was that someone could make such a judgment. How was this done? What kind of setup enabled a researcher to draw such conclusions? I made a copy of that article and soon, with the wrinkled, curling paper gradually losing all sign of its original freshness, read it and thought I understood it. Many years later, after having taught the message it delivered for the umpteenth time, I was satisfied that I had once again described the most elegant genetic experiment of the 20th century.

Sydney Brenner, one of the authors of the great paper discussed above, comments on that experiment in his book, saying “...this was one of the most beautiful, aesthetically elegant experiences of my life, in which just by doing these little operations you landed up with the detailed description of the molecular structure of living matter....”. So it is all there, including the feeling that the nature of the experiment was of enormous significance and highly satisfying personally.

The book is filled with Brenner's memories of his life in science, as told in tape-recorded interviews with Lewis Wolpert, another well-known biologist. The recollections, as with most statements Brenner makes, are clear and compelling. Errol Friedman and Eleanor Lawrence interject occasional sentences from time to time to clarify some of the remarks about science that Brenner makes. For the most part this formula works, even though it is somewhat removed from Brenner's original disquisition.

The book is essentially divided into two parts: everything up to the nematode and development, and everything after that. In fact, one can start with Brenner's precocity as a child reader, the books he read in the local public library and his admission to university at the age of 14. His family's poverty is illustrated when Brenner, on his way each morning to the university, was paid sixpence to stop at the local shul to be the stand-in tenth man for a minyan for daily mourners. There are far too few such tales of Brenner's personal life but, as the title says, this is a life in science.

With respect to the problem of development, there is no mystery in terms of Brenner's ability to focus on organisms more complex than bacteria. In college, he was mainly occupied with mammals and the problem of physiology. When the time came for action in the late 1960s on development, Brenner showed no hesitation in screening many organisms for something with simple enough growth and generation times and workable genetics. The nematode quickly became his choice. But what was the problem? The question is not merely how genes work, but how particular cells gain the ability to make use of certain genes. What is the 'construct' that allows the cooperative development process to proceed and to be regulated? Brenner left the monumental work on the nematode after about eight years because the new experimental opening was well established and the remainder was of no particular interest for him to tackle personally.

For the audience that does not know Brenner's work intimately, the topics and issues he deals with are discussed in a general fashion. Who would not be interested in his history of the nature of the code, the mRNA problem, nonsense suppressors and tRNA function, and the problem of development? There is no part of this book that is so riddled with jargon that it becomes unintelligible to the general biomedical or biological scientist.

What about memory? We are told that it is untruthful and unreliable in terms of writing an autobiography. While the science sections of this book are wonderfully well-described, other comments on the sociology of various problems and the last chapter on “endnotes” have reflective, personal opinions.

Brenner claims he is honest, not arrogant, a matter of some degree of interpretation. His descriptions of who made what mutants in early molecular biology and how useful they are seem sparse in terms of other people who contributed. Clearly, however, Brenner's place at the center of intellectual activity in the 50's and 60's gave him an opportunity, well-deserved, to make many significant contributions. Brenner's last comments about what we have done and where we are going, with respect to the creation of an authentic history of biology and evolution, are ultimately focused on a centerpiece, a "treasure house" of genomic DNA, with all the glorious and vital information to be gained from it. Let us hope that we will all be here to enjoy it.