Sir John Sulston

Speaker 30:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in two thousand and one, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:30

Mike Costaway this week is a scientist. His work has supported the greatest breakthrough in our understanding of human development since Darwin's theory of evolution. He's led this country's contribution to the Human Genome Project, the mapping and sequencing of our molecular structure, which provides us with the basic information we need to completely transform our ability to cure disease.

Presenter0:52

Historic achievements sometimes have mundane beginnings, and so it was with this case. Thirty years ago, he shut himself away for eighteen months and watched worms hatch. His painstaking research provided the basis for today's momentous discovery. In a world constantly attuned to the possibility of commercial advantage, he's remained passionate in his belief that information should be shared. The human genome discoveries, he believes, celebrate our understanding of life, and also, he says, freedom of access for all the hundreds and thousands of individual scientists on every continent. He is Sir John Sulston. So have you, John, now, actually held the book of life in your hand?

Sir John Sulston1:34

Yes, I have. In in the draft form that we have, it's as yet incomplete. We shall be completing it over the next couple of years. But I've held it in the form really of a C D-ROM on the sort of thing you might put into your computer to play a game. We can write the instructions to make a human being on that disk.

Presenter1:50

But a huge amount of information if you were to put that in a book

Sir John Sulston1:53

In books it would be something like thirty thousand ordinary novels to write it out all those letters. But we can't actually usefully read this stuff. It doesn't come nicely laid out in words and paragraphs that we can understand.

Presenter2:06

It's one long sentence.

Sir John Sulston2:06

One long sentence, exactly. One long string of letters with no punctuation whatever.

Presenter2:11

and only four letters A C

Sir John Sulston2:13

G and T. So it's pretty boring to look at. But with computers, it's great.

Presenter2:19

But now you know, do you not, would I be right in saying, that it

Presenter2:22

How we work, these bodies of ours, is finite. It can be done in the end.

Sir John Sulston2:29

We know the instructions are finite to build our bodies, but the instructions are written in code in the same sense that the engravings on the big stones in the British Museum, those wonderful hieroglyphs in the long room where the Rosetta Stone lives. Now, the Rosetta Stone, because it had a translation with it, enabled us to start understanding some of these hieroglyphs. The human genome is a little bit in that sense. I don't think we shall ever come to an end of exploring the human body because there will always be finer and finer interactions between its parts. Exactly, how do you build a body, an arm, a muscle, an eye? We know the genes now that go into that, the basic instructions, but we have to work out how they work. And this will take a huge amount of dedicated effort over decades to come.

Presenter3:14

But how long before we start to benefit in the sense of being able to find cures for certain diseases? That could happen really quite quickly, couldn't it?

Sir John Sulston3:22

I think over the next ten, twenty years, we're going to see a lot of changes as a result of this. I think it's generally thought, for example, that cancer treatment will improve quite a bit because that really is a disease of the genome.

Presenter3:34

What is interesting listening to you talk about all of that is that I read at the same time you don't regard yourself as any kind of intellectual. You've talked about yourself being an artisan. You've even compared yourself to a car mechanic. We certainly put scientists such as you on a pedestal. Surely you belong there, don't you? Can you answer that question?

Sir John Sulston3:54

No, absolutely not. We are artisans, I think, in the sense that we're trying to understand the universe. And this particular bit of the universe that we're talking about at the moment is our own bodies. The difference, perhaps, from a car mechanic is that we are discovering the workings of a car which somebody else has built. And it's a very, very complicated car. I mean, it has 30,000 genes telling it how to be put together. Each of those genes has many different functions. But the essence of taking the thing to pieces, I think, and making those sort of leaps of imagination that allows one to see how to ask the next question. Francis Crick was always very fond of saying, probably still is, that it's not answering the question that's hard, it's asking the question in the first place.

Presenter4:37

Asking the right question.

Sir John Sulston4:38

Asking the right question, exactly. And I think it's from there that comes the perhaps the pedestal thing, that the people who manage to ask the right questions are quite rightly honored for what they achieved.

Presenter4:39

SAP

Presenter4:50

Tell me about your first record.

Sir John Sulston4:51

I think the opening of The Rite of Spring is is a lovely place to begin. It's a record that I bought very early on and I think it's like an introduction to life.

Presenter6:01

The opening of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring played by the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra conducted by Antole Dorati. And you were saying you can hear a sort of heartbeat as well.

Sir John Sulston6:08

Yes, we begin to get the heartbeat there that goes right through the whole piece from then on.

Presenter6:12

Let me ask you if you'd take us on a trip, John, around this genome science, so we can hear about how you got into it. And I know you say you fell into it, but I mean it's been a long and happy fall, I think. Let's go back to these thirty thousand novels, you say, with this one long sentence in it. As I understand, and uh the majority of that I don't know what kind of percentage or you can put a figure on it but is is obsolete. It's something left over from our ancestors, but we carry it around with us.

Sir John Sulston6:38

Biology is like that. I mean, biology has all sorts of vestigial things. I mean, everybody knows they have an appendix, for example, which doesn't seem to have any function, but is left over because that's the way our gut evolved. And the genome is like that, only more so. It's full of fossils, which you can see, sort of old, old things that are no longer used, dead genes. It's in fact fascinating.

Presenter6:58

But as I understood it, some of it is left over from when we had fins or webbed feet. It told our ancestors, as it were, how how to use these things.

Sir John Sulston7:07

I I think that's right, although I think we we don't know enough about the the human genome and the working of the bodies yet to really put our our fingers on exactly what's still useful in some minor way. We don't know. So we don't know as much as we can.

Presenter7:17

But the small amount of active genes that do affect today what we are.

Presenter7:24

Do you know where they are? Are they waiting in a nice little clump waiting for you to come upon them, or are they scattered amongst all this obsolete stuff?

Sir John Sulston7:31

No, they're very much dispersed and that's precisely why we've got to do the whole thing.

Presenter7:36

But but this code, as I understand it, this alphabet of life, as it were, is basically the same in every organism on earth. So it's the same for a worm, for a fish, for a tree, as for us, is it? What makes us different?

Sir John Sulston7:48

What the the nature of the language is the same. It's all made up of A, G, C, and T, but the detailed sequences are different, just as one of our novels will differ from another novel. It'll have the same 26 letters in each case, but the words will be different.

Presenter8:01

So we've got superior controllers in ours, have we?

Sir John Sulston8:04

Well, a lot of it, yes, been going from worms and flies, these simple organisms that we've sequenced, to human. The class of gene that increases most is the executive class, the genes that tell other genes what to do. And they're the ones that probably make us unique. I mean, what is it that makes us different from a mouse? Well, I think in very large measure it's genes that tell us how long to go on growing, how big to make our brain. What makes us different from a chimpanzee? It'll be of quite a select number of control mechanisms that tell our brains to go on growing longer.

Presenter8:37

Why was it, therefore, that you started with the worm? What was so special about the worm?

Sir John Sulston8:42

Because we were working on it, because it was there. The worms grow very fast. They're very simple animals. We can manipulate them in various ways. But in so doing, we got ourselves going for the big one.

Presenter8:52

What's the name of the worm?

Sir John Sulston8:54

The worm is Cenorabditis elegans, he's a nematode, which is a round worm.

Presenter9:00

We'll come back to him later, but I want to know more about you first of all. But let's pause for some music. What's record number two?

Sir John Sulston9:05

From my student days really, I remember so well listening to A D P F and we're going to have the song that's perhaps most strongly associated with her, Che ne reguetrien.

Speaker 19:15

Java Parsons.

Speaker 39:26

Yeah. No.

Speaker 19:27

Oh Jean Argretoria

Speaker 19:31

Nila bea coma fa nila ma

Speaker 19:39

The crack.

Speaker 39:39

Maybe a nega Uh

Presenter9:43

Edith Pieff at Paris Olympia in nineteen sixty one and Nant Je ner grate turnien.

Presenter9:48

Um tell me about Sulston, the boy, brought up in the bittermannesque suburbs of London. Rickmansworth, wasn't it? Were you neat, tidy, and respectable then?

Sir John Sulston9:55

Well you

Sir John Sulston9:58

I think I was at first.

Presenter10:01

What happened?

Sir John Sulston10:03

I gradually, I suppose, went through my adolescent years trying to figure out what on earth it was all for. I was very consistently a a a scientist in the with my fingers. I never had any problem about what I wanted to do, what I was going to do in the sixth form.

Sir John Sulston10:17

I wanted to play with the toys and I wanted to understand how things were.

Presenter10:23

Play with the toys is a phrase that comes through quite often with you. What do you mean when you say just b being in the laboratory hands-on?

Sir John Sulston10:26

Yeah.

Sir John Sulston10:29

Yes, exactly. I'm I think I'm not a an academic at heart, although obviously I'm I'm part of that world.

Presenter10:36

Your father was a man of the cloth.

Sir John Sulston10:38

Yes, he was. He was not actually looking after a parish. He wasn't a vicar, but he worked at a missionary society in London. And it was actually a rather critical time of my life in the late teens where I had to decide whether or not I was a believer. And I decided against, which obviously is, you know, it's not so important for m lots of people, but it was quite important for me because of the family situation.

Presenter10:59

It must have disappointed him a lot.

Sir John Sulston11:00

I think it did. It was sad that that that happened, but uh it it's part of being oneself.

Presenter11:04

Just tell me about you at school and at Cambridge you did organic chemistry, didn't you? You didn't apparently shine particularly.

Sir John Sulston11:12

No, it was a bit of a struggle as an undergraduate for exactly the reason we that we were just discussing, that my science came more from my fingers than from the books.

Presenter11:21

But were you driven? Did did you think this is really, really what I want to do? Or did you simply enjoy because you sat in Cambridge in the end for about six years, didn't you? You stayed on did a piece of the.

Sir John Sulston11:28

That's right.

Presenter11:30

Did you think I really love being in this laboratory playing with these toys? This is where I'm happy. This is what I'll do.

Speaker 311:30

Yeah.

Sir John Sulston11:36

I did once I began, and there was a big change when I finished my first degree and became a research student. And from then on, I was clearly the laboratory was where I belonged. But of course, that was going back to this playing with the toys aspect. And then, on top of that, and I probably got this from my father, I do have a motivation to be of service, actually. And I think there was some vague sense as I went into scientific research that this was going to be useful because I think it's immensely powerful motive for the human race to expand its knowledge. Really, if you like, what culturally we're here for, is to understand more.

Presenter12:10

Record number three.

Sir John Sulston12:12

After being in Cambridge, Daphne and I were married in the in the summer of nineteen sixty six, and we went to California, and there, of course, we heard Simon and Garfunkel.

Speaker 312:22

Why don't you show your face and bear in my mind?

Speaker 312:28

These can't stick to the sky

Speaker 312:32

Lack of floating question why

Speaker 312:36

They linger there till die.

Speaker 312:41

They don't break.

Speaker 112:42

Well they're going and my friend either do I Uh

Presenter12:50

Simon and Garfunkel and Cloudy, memories of being in California, age 24.

Presenter12:56

Wonderful place to be. Second half of sixties. How hippie did it get for you?

Sir John Sulston13:01

I always think with that song you can hear the clouds of marijuana drifting in cast. But of course there is an enormously powerful side to California as well. It has this great upfront presentation of friendliness, but underneath it's a powerhouse. And I was at the Salk Institute, which was a new institute working on prebiotic chemistry, which means studying the origin of life, how life might have originated on the Earth's surface. But it was we had our first child there. It wasn't a hippie existence, probably more suburban. But we had a little wooden house near the beach and we used to go down and spend time there. I used to walk along the beach to the lab sometimes. It was actually rather an idyllic existence.

Presenter13:40

Mm. And you were spoilt rotten, you say, at the Institute.

Sir John Sulston13:43

Oh, I have to confess that, yes. It was a great place to be because lots of the great and the good of science were coming through and one would go out to dinner and chat to chat with the Nobel Prize winners. Well, yes, exactly. And so I wanted to go on. I thought, I'll find employment in science I will carry on.

Presenter13:53

Chat with Nobel Prize winners.

Presenter14:03

And you got hooked in order to do it by the worm. It was the worm that got you, I think, and brought you back to the English.

Sir John Sulston14:08

Well, yes it was Sydney. It was Sidney Brenner and Francis Crick who brought me back to that particular job. Francis Crick was by then a visiting fellow at the Salk Institute. And on behalf of Sidney Brenner, who was now recruiting people into his new organism, which he was building out the worm, he got Francis to interview me and they said, Okay, you know, come back. And so I did.

Presenter14:28

These were the same laboratories we should say where Crick and Watson, Francis Crick and Jim Watson had, in fact, discovered DNA in 1952. Exactly. We were absolutely going back to the heart.

Sir John Sulston14:34

Exactly.

Sir John Sulston14:36

To the heart

Presenter14:37

the heartland of of this pioneering science.

Sir John Sulston14:37

The heartland of

Sir John Sulston14:40

Where Fred Sanger was, who had worked out how to sequence proteins and was now going to, though we didn't know he would succeed at that time, going to learn to sequence DNA.

Presenter14:49

And you began on this worm, the nematode worm. No one thought it possible, as I understand it, to study how the cells of that worm divide. They'd taken photographs of them, they were blurred, it was difficult, nothing was working out. And you, am I right, thought, I know what you do. You sit down and you stare at it.

Sir John Sulston15:07

Yes. Yes, that's right. I mean it was Sydney's idea that the that the that cell lineage, as we call it, the pattern of cell divisions, would be established. But the ones that go on inside the egg were quite hard to see. And it was patience. I love looking at things.

Presenter15:22

So how long did you sit at that bench staring into the microscope?

Sir John Sulston15:26

Well, off and on it went on through the seventies, but the particularly difficult bit, the par what went on in the egg, occupied me solidly for a year and a half. And I guess that was right at the end of the seventies. I think it's a good idea.

Presenter15:36

How many hours a day would you sit and stare at it?

Sir John Sulston15:39

I would have a session in the morning and a session in the in the afternoon and each session would be four or five hours and I would just sit there at the microscope and draw and draw and draw every five minutes what I saw. And then next day or next session I would come in and look at another part of it.

Presenter15:42

How long has it to you?

Speaker 115:43

Uh

Presenter15:55

And do you have to have silence around you to do that?

Sir John Sulston15:57

Oh, I was but yes, I was pretty obnoxious. I used to keep the room in semi darkness and uh and keep the door shut and people just didn't come to see me all that time.

Presenter16:04

But what is that experience like? Because I suppose we all have a a small idea of it when we look through binoculars, you know, you you are projecting yourself, you're over there, look sitting on the twig with the bird, as it were.

Sir John Sulston16:13

Mm-hmm.

Sir John Sulston16:15

Does it work?

Presenter16:16

No, that's exactly what I'm saying.

Sir John Sulston16:18

No, that's exactly right. Exactly. That's how one does it. One is the cell one is watching. One divides as the cell divides. And one sees, therefore, where the pieces go, because you are that cell. That's the way, actually, we understand everything. I do remember understanding at school for the first time how a transformer works. I remember trying and trying to understand this, how the electricity at one voltage got changed into electricity at the other.

Sir John Sulston16:43

And I became, one evening, I'm sitting at home, I became that transformer.

Sir John Sulston16:48

And I felt the voltages, and I felt the currents, and I felt the magnetism in my core, and suddenly I knew how it worked.

Presenter16:55

More music.

Sir John Sulston16:58

This is actually going back a little from California in my memory, although it's a record that's been with Daphne and me all our lives. But when I first went to see her in her bedsit, this Mozart clarinet quintet was the record she most often had playing.

Presenter18:11

The opening of Mozart's clarinet quintet played by the Brandis Quartet and Karl Leister.

Presenter18:17

So it was the work on that worm, John Sulston, which made your scientific reputation and also was to become the kind of pilot project really for the mapping of the human genome, wasn't it? Because in the 1990s you and your collaborator Bob Waterston of Washington University St. Louis went on to sequence its genes. It was the first free living animal ever to be decoded, wasn't it?

Sir John Sulston18:38

That's right, yes. We finished it in 1998. But right at the beginning, before we were even sequencing, we were looking at pieces of the genome and mapping them, as we say. And what this means is just getting the pieces arranged, a bit like a large jigsaw puzzle. But before we began, people said, Oh, it's not worth doing that. What you ought to be doing is to study real biological problems. Look, John, they would say, you've done all this cell lineaging and you ought to be getting mutants. You ought to be finding out how the cell lineage works. And I said, I'm not sure. I think it's more complicated than that. We really need to get at all the genes. And so I started this business, and Bob quickly joined in, of looking directly at the genome as a whole. And the marvellous thing was that after two or three years of our doing this, where we began to have a map of these pieces, people said, This is wonderful. We can now find all our genes. And so we developed the idea of very close collaboration, almost formal collaboration, with all of the worm community because all of those people working on the worm were communicating with us, who were looking at the genome.

Presenter19:39

So no one was selfish, no one was hanging on to their bit, there was a total collaboration.

Sir John Sulston19:42

Exactly. It was enormously important.

Presenter19:44

Which is exactly what the Human Genome Project has been to a large extent the public. When was it decided that everyone that the US, we, Japan and France would get together and cooperate on this one?

Sir John Sulston19:55

Well, it Jim Watson actually was pushing this very hard at the end of the 80s. But there was a particular moment when we all all the labs met in Bermuda. And we met in Bermuda precisely because it's a rock in the middle of the Atlantic, so it's a sort of neutral place. It was in the off season, I should add. It was terribly cold and windy.

Presenter20:13

Yeah.

Speaker 320:13

You didn't enjoy it.

Sir John Sulston20:16

So we were there and we I remember standing at the board there trying to construct with the assembled labs a statement to the effect that all of us would release all of our data all the time and we would not try to take patents. And we came out with what have been called the Bermuda principles and have actually informed quite a lot of endeavour since.

Presenter20:40

But commercial interests had begun because where there are big profits to be made and cures for disease are on the horizon, then money is going to enter in and huge profits can be made. So into your arch rival, Craig Venter, an American scientist who we'll hear about in a minute. But let's pause for your fifth piece of music.

Sir John Sulston20:59

The next piece is a celebration in a way of a life because Kirstie McColl tragically died earlier this year. And I am remember her not only for her songs and her life, but because she was one of the many

Sir John Sulston21:14

wonderful singers that were introduced to Daphne and me by our children, who are now in their thirties, I call them children. And they started giving us discs for Christmas and birthdays of people that we otherwise wouldn't have heard. And Kirstie McColl is one of them.

Presenter21:28

The names and the places all change

Presenter21:33

But don't come the cowboy with me, Sonny Chin. I know lots of those and you're not one of them. There's a light in your eyes, tells me somebody's in.

Presenter21:46

Uh

Speaker 321:46

You won't come to California with me.

Presenter21:53

Kirsty McCall, and don't come the cowboy with me, Sonny Jim. So back, John Sulston, to your rival on the other side of the Atlantic, Craig Venter. The essential difference between

Presenter22:03

Yours and his venture was his was private and yours was public, essentially. He's been characterized along the way as a ruthless competitor. You said he was morally, is morally wrong. Why?

Sir John Sulston22:18

I think whilst my attitude to research in general is a sort of personal choice, I think it's absolutely great that some people are going after applications and others are doing pure research like me. There's no sort of moral issues there at all. I do feel that in the case of the human genome, the code that makes human beings, there's something rather different, that this is something which is a heritage. It's not something that should be in any sense bought and sold.

Presenter22:46

But explain to me the problem of having genes patented, which is essentially what what he's been doing, as it were, is that that therefore monopolises that gene so that if it does, if it turns out to be a crucial gene,

Presenter22:58

It's his and and his company's right, not yours, not anybody else's.

Sir John Sulston23:02

Yes, but of course he's not alone in that, as he would be quick to say. The notion of patenting pieces of the human genome is quite widespread, and in my opinion, it should happen at a level much nearer application. I don't think that it's appropriate to patent human genes per se, because we don't just want this information to be available to the rich, to the rich companies or individuals. We want it to be available to all of the world, especially the developing world. And we've put it there, thanks to the Wellcome Trust, the NIH, and the other governments around the world who've contributed.

Presenter23:33

But while this was going on, it was a kind of space race, really, wasn't it? You were you know, it was the private versus the public racing to get there first, because if he got there before you, then it would be patented, it would be cut off from the rest of the world, and indeed from the the developing countries, as you say.

Sir John Sulston23:48

Potentially, yes. And certainly there was a pressure to get the material out there. I mean, it it's the only thing is there wasn't a clear finishing line. It wasn't even clear that we were exactly in the same race. But you're quite right. There was certainly pressure to get as much material out there as fast as possible.

Presenter24:02

More music.

Sir John Sulston24:03

This is also, I suppose, going back to those days in California, but actually a little later than that, I think, when this one came out. The songs of Tom Lehrer, I think, are a wonderful satire on all sorts of things. And this particular one, I think, is a satire on marketing things that really should not be marketed.

Speaker 124:22

It's called The Vatican Rag.

Speaker 124:28

First you get down on your knees, fiddle with your rosaries, bow your head with great respect, and chiny fleck, chiny fleck, chiny fleck.

Speaker 124:41

Do whatever steps you want if you have cleared them with the pontiff Everybody say his own Kyrie Lay is on doing the Vatican right

Speaker 324:46

Song Kiri ALL.

Speaker 324:48

Bye-bye.

Presenter24:51

Tom Lera and the Vatican Rag.

Presenter24:54

Isn't there, though, John, when we were talking about this competition across the Atlantic, isn't there an advantage to having such competition, because it makes things more efficient, it makes them quicker. Hasn't he forced the pace? Haven't you come forward much, much earlier not say a decade earlier than you might have done, than you predicted you were going to do?

Sir John Sulston25:12

No, not a decade. There may have been some acceleration. There's certainly been acceleration to producing this partial product. And there certainly has been a heightening of interest in it because everybody loves a good fight. And I think out of that can come lots of good things and discussion. And I think in general I would be the first to say that competition is good. I think the negative side is a possible deflection of opinion from what's important to what isn't. It doesn't matter being there first really with this sort of incomplete version of the human genome. What's really happening now is that the public domain and only the public domain is continuing during the coming two years to join up all the little pieces and get everything sorted out, correct the errors.

Presenter25:58

Everything's sorted out correctly. In February this year, you published in Nature, he published in Science. It it did get quite dirty, didn't it? This sort of genomic war of the Titans, as it were.

Sir John Sulston26:00

In February this year you

Sir John Sulston26:10

You mean the commentary is comments going back and forth? Yeah.

Sir John Sulston26:13

Well, yes. I mean, I I'm I must say, I mean, I've been accused of mudslinging at times. I don't believe I have. I mean, I think what I've done is to respond when necessary to correct points of fact. I've never gone out of my way to be unkind or unpleasant. But I think we have had to defend this position that it is important.

Presenter26:13

Well, yes.

Speaker 126:26

Yeah.

Presenter26:26

But I think we have

Sir John Sulston26:30

that the uh genome is in the public domain and I've never made any bones about that.

Presenter26:34

Certainly, and that's always been understood. But nevertheless, when the public project guys, i. e. you and everybody else, got Tony Blair and Bill Clinton to make that announcement early last year when they said that they would like to see unencumbered access to this data, it wiped a kind of one hundred and fifty dollars off uh his company's Fentless company's share price, didn't it?

Sir John Sulston26:47

This day

Sir John Sulston26:53

So it had quite an effect on the stock market, which it was overinflated. I mean, there there had been the the share prices of a number of companies being pushed up too much in the expectation that gene patents would work, and it's a natural thing that that would that would drop.

Presenter27:05

But it must have made you smile.

Sir John Sulston27:06

Yeah.

Presenter27:06

Yeah.

Sir John Sulston27:06

Put a smile on your face.

Presenter27:08

Well it hasn't had

Sir John Sulston27:08

Hasn't had any

Presenter27:10

Yeah.

Sir John Sulston27:10

Yes, but the trouble is at the same time, it's true, I smile, but I mean these are minor victories or skirmishes in the whole thing, because what happens is that a company doesn't sort of go quietly away and say, oh, day, we didn't do that one. What happens is they constantly change their position. I mean, that's the job of a company, is to keep its bottom line. And there is still a possibility that if we don't keep on pushing back, that people in general will say, oh, well, the public domain didn't do very well in the end, and we should all go private. But then you see the thing will slip back into the position where it's a rich person's club to have access to the totality of biological information.

Presenter27:50

Mechanism seven.

Sir John Sulston27:51

For no very good reason, but just because I love it, we're going to hear Dvorak's piano triona E minor, the Dunkey trio.

Presenter28:57

Part of the first movement of Vorjak's piano trio in E minor played by the Beaux Art trio.

Presenter29:03

So, John Salston, what about society in general? And you've very much made the point that you believe, as we said at the outset, that there should be total freedom of access to this kind of hugely important and fundamental information. We haven't touched at all on the abuse of that kind of information, and we we know about designer babies and the whole ugly side of eugenics. Do you have faith that it's not going to be misused in some way? Or do you think, well, if it is, that's what happens? Where do you come from on that one?

Sir John Sulston29:34

I think, first of all, we must keep on acquiring new knowledge. I see that as a good. I think the other thing, though, the condition, if you like, I'm a conditional optimist.

Sir John Sulston29:43

I really demand of myself and society, my fellows.

Sir John Sulston29:49

That we use knowledge responsibly, because I think that's really what it's about.

Presenter29:53

But you can't ensure that you can't

Sir John Sulston29:55

I can't ensure it, but I can talk about it, and that's why I say I'm a conditional optimist. If most of us, or lots of people, choose to use knowledge in a way which is destructive, which doesn't benefit other people.

Presenter30:09

And they will and they will you know

Sir John Sulston30:10

Some will I know that some will, but I think a majority will not, which is why I'm an optimist.

Presenter30:15

You've recently been knighted and you've retired now as director of of of the Sanger Centre. Um you're only fifty eight?

Sir John Sulston30:23

50, yes, 59, I think. Somewhere around there.

Presenter30:26

Somewhere around there. What are you going to do? You can't just put all of this aside now, as I say. Having been such a central figure in all of this, what's your ambition now? What do you want to do?

Sir John Sulston30:37

I would very much like to explore. I am exploring actively with some organ other organizations whether or not I can play a role in pushing forward.

Sir John Sulston30:45

What we've been talking about.

Presenter30:46

Genome Ambassador

Sir John Sulston30:48

Possibly. I don't know.

Presenter30:48

Yes.

Presenter30:51

Does that appeal?

Sir John Sulston30:52

It's it's possibly, but only if it's real. I think there are plenty of talking shops around that achieve nothing, and I shall be wanting to see if I can contribute something real. That's a very arrogant thing to say, isn't it?

Presenter31:06

Last piece of music.

Sir John Sulston31:08

The last one is a a late Beethoven string quartet. It starts sadly, almost gloomily, but ends serenely. I think it's an old man coming to terms with his life.

Presenter32:19

The opening of Beethoven's string quartet number thirteen in B flat major, played by the Smettener Quartet. If you could only take one of those eight records with you, I wonder which one you'd choose.

Sir John Sulston32:29

Oh, it has to be the Beethoven. I think.

Sir John Sulston32:32

I know that listening to that time and time again I shall constantly find new layers in it.

Presenter32:37

What about your book? What book would you like to take?

Sir John Sulston32:39

Well

Sir John Sulston32:41

I think I'm going to cheat a little here, because what I really want to take is the Oxford Anthology of English Verse. And the reason I want to take it is because I want to declaim those poems, some of which I remember from my school days, some of which are new to me, some of which I don't know yet, as I walk along the beach. And sometimes I shall be declaiming, In the storm, a Blake, O Rose, thou art sick, the invisible worm.

Sir John Sulston33:09

Another time I shall be remembering London through Betchermann.

Sir John Sulston33:13

rumble under thunder over Midland bound for Cricklewood, the ch description of the suburbs where I grew up. And in that book I think I have the memories of all sorts of aspects of my life.

Presenter33:26

And what about a luxury?

Sir John Sulston33:28

What I want to do is to look at things. I love to look at things, and I was torn rather between.

Sir John Sulston33:34

Taking the telescope, which the lab gave me for my retirement, or taking the microscope.

Sir John Sulston33:40

which I use to do the worm lineage. If I have to choose, I have to go for the microscope because there is going to be so many things on that island undiscovered and I want to spend the rest of my time there looking at them in detail.

Presenter33:55

Sir John Selston, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Sir John Sulston33:59

Yeah.

Presenter33:59

Bye.

Sir John Sulston33:59

Thank you.

Speaker 334:07

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.