John Sulston
The Life Scientific
BBC
4.6 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 29 November 2011
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Jim al-Khalili talks to biologist John Sulston about sequencing the genome first of a worm and then of man.
When, as a young man, John Sulston first decided to sequence the DNA of a worm, many of his fellow scientists thought he was wasting his time. It took twenty years of painstaking research but it paid off handsomely. Sulston's research on this humble worm led to one of the most significant scientific breakthroughs of the modern age - the sequencing of the human genome. Jim al -Khalili talks to Sulston about the highs and lows of doing genetic research; fighting to keep scientific findings in the public domain; protecting human health against corporate wealth; and having his DNA portrait done.
Producer: Anna Buckley.
Transcript
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| 0:38.0 | In June 2000, Tony Blair and Bill Clinton announced to the world that scientists had sequenced the entire human genome. |
| 0:48.0 | That they'd decoded our DNA and written out the instruction manual for life. In so doing they'd given us all an |
| 0:54.8 | extraordinary insight into who we are, the importance of which we're only now beginning |
| 0:59.7 | to appreciate. It was and still is an incredible achievement on par with mapping all the stars in the galaxy or the entire road network of the planet. |
| 1:10.0 | As head of the British end of the Human Genome Project, my guest today was responsible for |
| 1:15.8 | sequencing one-third of the human genome. But much more importantly than that, he says, is the |
| 1:21.4 | work he did to protect this precious insight into what |
| 1:25.1 | makes us who we are from being exploited by commercial interests and hidden from |
| 1:29.8 | us. Sir John Soulston wants the world to know just how close we came to losing our right to read the secret of life itself. |
| 1:39.0 | He says taking out patents on genetic information is patently wrong. |
| 1:44.6 | John Sillston, your life scientific, led to one of the most exciting breakthroughs in biology |
| 1:50.2 | in the 20th century, but it all began with a rather humble worm. |
| 1:55.0 | Indeed it did, that's right. |
| 1:57.0 | Thanks to my boss Sidney Brenner, who rescued this worm, as it were, from obscurity and turned it into one of the most |
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