John Sulston Interview (page: 3 / 7) Nobel Prize in Medicine	Print Interview

Do any important lessons come to mind that you learned from your parents?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. John Sulston: I do think this issue of being a little unworldly is something which I must have got from them. You know, that I was not encouraged to think of money and possessions as being important. They were valued insofar as they allowed one to live peacefully and do what one needed to do. I mean, certainly the advantages of actually being able to eat and have a roof. We're not talking about destitution. But we are talking about not thinking of wishing to own an expensive thing for its own sake. That would be frowned upon and thought of as being flippant.

Were you a good kid?

John Sulston: I think I was fairly good. I know there were one or two rebellions, so I think I had something else in me. But on the whole I wanted to please, I think.

What kind of student were you?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. John Sulston: A student -- as I went through my adolescence, I think I did become less -- as I came to university I was somewhat less amenable. I look at it -- it's quite interesting, actually -- a combination of things that happened to me. It was very important, my time around the age of 18 onwards. One thing was, I was detaching myself from my father's religion, and that was very traumatic for both of us. I was in the course of becoming an atheist, in effect. Although that describes it too dramatically. But one has to decide how one's going to live one's life. Is it going to be by some spiritual style or is it going to be a secular system? Mine was going to be secular, and that's what I was in the process of finding out. So there was that going on. And then the other thing that happened is that, in a strange way, at university I was detached from the science that I loved, because it was purely -- as I saw it anyway -- book learning. And I never liked book learning. I've always been bored by words, and so what I like are things happening. You know, things that I can do. And so it was kind of a dry period in my life, and it was only when I came back to the formal lab bench as a graduate student, that I found that I was actually doing something that I liked. Because I didn't want to do theoretical science, I wanted to do the real thing.

Were you popular when you were growing up? What did you do with your spare time?

John Sulston: It was very much just playing around with things.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. My bedroom was full of stuff. Full of electrical things, mechanical things, biological things, things growing in aquariums. It was a den of amusing, interesting things to watch and to play with. I made radios. Everything was very much in that sort of period of time, when one could play with all these things, and now we play with computers. I would play with computers if I was at this stage now. You see what I mean? It's a hobbying kind of science. So that was a lot of my spare time. And I think that, in fact, I was probably quite a narrow, swotty little kid in some ways. You can just see that this was all I wanted. It's only later that I found myself expanding more, and as I knew more people, and enjoyed talking to them. But I think, actually, in a funny way, maybe I wasn't so different, because I was not very large for my age. And I'm sure that there would be potential for bullying at school, as one is, you know. I know what happened, looking back, reconstructing, is that in fact my words -- there must have been some wit, or some ability to hit back verbally against those who might wish to dominate me. And so I was actually quite popular at school, I think. So that although I was working hard, I think they didn't regard me as being a bad kind of swot. So it worked for me. But it's very interesting, isn't it, this way in which we become socialized? It really is difficult for most, I think. All of us have to go through that period of socializing, and finding out how we fit in with our fellow human beings. That was what happened with me.

Did you love cricket, or other games?

John Sulston: No, I didn't love cricket. I hated cricket. I'm so slow. I have very poor physical reactions, I think. Or maybe my brain just isn't in gear, it's thinking about something else.

What books were important to you when you were growing up?

John Sulston: That's a good question. I remember very much enjoying Arthur Ransome, who wrote a series of books. This is at a fairly young age. I'm talking about pre-adolescent, probably then. He wrote a series of books about kids going camping and stuff. Nothing much happens, in a way, but it's just being outdoors and trying to do things, manipulating things. I enjoyed those very much. I think later on I probably became more and more interested in books that described the world about us. I had lots of books about how it works. Cosmology, whatever. So I had lots of these kinds of things. Finding out about the world.

Did you have heroes? Role models?

John Sulston: It's a good question, because I do feel that I've been mentored. Not by a single person, but by a series of people.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. One person, curiously, looking back -- and I'm always doubtful whether I've reconstructed this somehow, and made it up, as one can with memories -- is Fred Sanger. As I was definitely aware of him when I was at school. And the curious thing is that, purely by chance, I came back eventually and worked as a scientist in the same lab where Fred was, as well as a number of other people of his standing: the Nobel Prize winner Francis Crick, and then there was Sydney Brenner. There were all sorts of people there. Anyway, Fred was one of them. I realized when I met him again that he had been my hero. I think there were a couple of things. One was that Fred was doing something which was completely non-flashy, and that it was just something which was important. Basically, he was finding out how to discover the inner structure, first of all, of proteins, the sequencing of those, and then the sequencing of DNA. Along with that, was his personality, which was completely non-flamboyant, just getting on with the job. These, I'm sure, appealed to me in some way. So I think that imbued me.

Later on, I was mentored by my research supervisor, Colin Reese, and then by Leslie Orgel as a postdoctoral student in California. I got on very well with Leslie. He spoiled me, rather. He had people coming through. I would have dinner with the greats, and so on. I probably thought rather more highly of myself than I should have done, being invited to the high table, as it were. But that was huge fun. Of course, it is exactly that kind of mentoring that young people benefit from, just to be given a chance to exchange on equal terms with people who've seen more than they have. So I'm sure I benefited hugely.

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