โ Scribed by John E. Sulston
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Thank you so very much for inviting me to be here. It gives me a mingled sense of humility at how much I owe to others, and of joy that the collective work on the worm has been recognised in this way.
Among the first of my many mentors was my PhD supervisor, Colin Reese, who was developing nonaqueous methods for oligonucleotide synthesis (see, for example, ref. [1]). Colin passed me on to my postdoctoral supervisor Leslie Orgel at the Salk Institute, to work on prebiotic chemistry. The plan was to see to what extent we could copy RNA chains without enzymes. The products were obtained in low yield, and the challenge was to work out the sequences that had been produced. We used cutting with different ribonucleases, and chromatography to separate the fragments (see, for example, ref. [2]).
My introduction to Caenorhabditis elegans came in 1969 with my move, at Leslie's suggestion, to Sydney Brenner's group at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology (Figure 1). Sydney was reputed to be setting up a group to work on the nervous system of a nematode, though at that point nobody knew much about it. [3]
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