John Sulston Interview (page: 5 / 7) Nobel Prize in Medicine	Print Interview

What role does philosophy play in what you do?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. John Sulston: I think in the terms of the scientific process, the history really doesn't matter. It doesn't matter where it came from, who did it, what the motivations were. The point is, we know what we know, or we know what we think we know. We're always challenging it, of course. And then we go on and do more. We constantly build and try to understand and integrate. Sometimes we slip back a little, but mostly it's a forward progress. We just enlarge the area of knowing and push back the area of unknowing. But of course, in another sense, the history is important, but that's when we move out of science, into the way people feel: inter-philosophy, if you like. I think the accumulated knowledge of science and the example of cosmology is a good one. Where the solar system -- indeed the universe -- was turned inside out over quite a short period of time. They call it the Enlightenment. It's one of many things that happened then. The traditional view, the establishment view, that the earth was the center of the universe, certainly wasn't valid any more. It happened at that moment in time, but the important thing to me is that it changed the philosophy of humankind forever. Because we really had sufficient basis not to think that way anymore -- and of course, 400 years later where it can be in no possible doubt -- because we go out in spaceships and actually look at the whole thing from the outside. So it's no longer even philosophy, but you see what I mean. It means we think about ourselves in a different way. So many people have reported back the effect it had on them, of looking at the earth from space. Or even more, the few people who have been to the moon. Looking back at that little, bluey-white globe and thinking, "That's it? That's our only home." It's in that sense one is forced to reconsider the human condition in, I think, a very productive way. So science is philosophy.

During the course of all of this, did you ever suffer self-doubts? Fear of failure?

John Sulston: Oh yes. Dreadful.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. The goblins dance at 4:00 a.m. I think the thing one learns slightly painfully, when your goblins dance as an adolescent, I think you always want to grow up. You think you'll get through this inside. And in a sense you do. Obviously, the concerns change, but you always have the self-doubts. You always think, "Why on Earth am I doing this? What possible use am I? Why was I born?" It's ridiculous. And so I think the goblins dancing is a part of the human condition, too. And you learn to live with them, and as you get older they become less acute. But they still tap away there.

How important is it in what you do, to take risks?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. John Sulston: In research, if you take no risk, then you will just do what you know already. You can always find things to do that just fill in the little gaps and so on, and turn the handle and do the experiment again. Of course, sometimes you have to do that. When you have a productive line, you do turn the handle and do the experiment again, with small variations to map it all out. But in the end, if one wants to go forward, then one must do something that one doesn't know how to do. You're going to find out how to do it. And you don't know the outcome. You're going to find the outcome. And that's, of course, when you really do move. And that process inevitably is risky. Because neither you nor anybody else can say something being done for the first time will work. So you have to try it. Now of course, the advantage of doing research science in this way is that you're not in fact risking a nation, or even a lab usually. You're risking your own credibility perhaps, for if you go on the wrong line, people will say, "Well, he wasted his time." You get no publication. So there's a little bit of personal risk, but it's not the kind of risk that one meets in large scale human endeavors, where you're actually having to risk other people's lives. So in some way we are a little protected in academic life from those sorts of things.

Have you always done the sensible thing?

John Sulston: Oh no.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I think the sensible thing is probably the non-risky thing, and therefore you're always staying in the light. No, no. I think it's important to do things that maybe aren't very sensible. One of the things that comes up again and again in science -- and people comment that somebody has made progress because they didn't know that what they were trying to do was impossible -- always, at any stage, there is a given establishment view of things. So it's great -- and generally one does it when one's relatively young -- just to step outside and say, "Look, I don't care. I just don't want to work in this box anymore. I'm going to jump out here, even though everybody says it's crazy." That's obviously an important part of the process. Having done that, of course, you've created your own new little box, and you start to fill it in assiduously, just like the old establishment did theirs.

This is a question that came up in conversation with Francis Collins. How important is nonconformity to scientific inquiry?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. John Sulston: I think it's important to be nonconformist. Or at least it's useful. That's right. You can take a line, if you want to, where you are very much in the train with everybody else. But somehow or another, the human motive for many of us is to say, "I'm bored with this train. I just want to do my own thing." In my case -- I don't know about Francis -- it's quite nice to be off in a low population area. Many people have been surprised that I haven't continued in this science of genomics, and what they call now "functional genomics." It's very simple. For me, when I came into what I'm doing now -- or what I have been really for the last few years -- when I came into it, we kind of invented the field in the '80s, you know. Not me alone, I mean, a number of us. We were all working in different places. We all realized that we had to deal with the genome. We had to map and sequence it. But we were working in an area where there were few practitioners and we didn't have to pay attention to what a lot of other people are doing. The field turned out to be a valued one, in the sense that what we were doing succeeded. It was productive. And everybody came in, so now I feel like it's a herd of buffalo. It's running around in the plain, throwing up dust. I don't want to be there anymore. I want to be out somewhere isolated.

So in that sense, clearly, I've been driven, on a couple of occasions, I think, to nonconformity. The reason I came into genomics was precisely because it was not highly populated. Whereas where I'd been before now, in the cell lineage work, it was highly populated. Everybody on the worm is doing this. I didn't want to have to follow every particular thing, dealing with everybody. I wanted to do something which was more on my own, where I could just follow my own line. So I'm one of those who've been nonconformist, it's clear in that way. I don't think I've been very nonconformist, but enough to take me out of the crowd.

Is that the importance of courage: going in directions where no one has gone before?

John Sulston: Yes. I think that's right. But it's something you want to do. It's nice to call it courage, if you like. I think it's just to say, "I don't care if it doesn't work. At least I'm doing my thing." If that's courage, fine. But there's also a kind of bloody-mindedness about it.

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