John Sulston Interview (page: 6 / 7) Nobel Prize in Medicine	Print Interview

What was your reaction to winning the Nobel Prize?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. John Sulston: I really felt, immediately, that this was something I would prefer not to happen. Because I didn't feel myself, in that way, appropriate to be singled out. It was immediately tempered though, that thought, by the fact that I was receiving it along with Sydney Brenner and Bob Horvitz, and that's a very good group of people to share it with. So I did feel, in some ways, inadequate to this position. And yet at the same time, I was very glad that the worm had got a prize, because this was the first time that this little nematode worm had really got this top prize. I was very happy for the others, and I was happy for the people that we worked with. I must say, I found that everybody was awfully nice about it. I mean, there is a fear. I think many people have this fear. They think the emails are going to come in, saying, "You rat! Why did you do this? Why did you get this?" Nobody did that. And not behind my back either. Everybody wrote, actually, very kindly, and did feel, apparently, that it was a good prize. So that made me feel okay about it, even though I do feel that I've been over-honored, just as I do now, with the Academy of Achievement, I must say.

Has winning the Nobel Prize changed things for you in any way?

John Sulston: Oh, yeah. It makes things very busy, and makes the email and the telephone very busy. That's a hard thing for somebody like me to deal with. Because, as I've indicated, I'm somebody who wants to try and be off on their own quite a bit. Now I don't have any excuse for that. I have to really carve out personal time, in a way which wasn't the case before. There's something awfully nice about being unknown and anonymous.

You've written that your leadership role as Director of the Sanger Centre was sort of thrust on you, without your pursuing it..

John Sulston: That's absolutely right. It must be said, nobody forced me. I seized it vigorously with both hands. But not because it was leadership. Not because it involved more people. Just because I thought this was important.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. This whole experience of having started in genomics, which simply means taking all the DNA from an organism and dealing with it. Not picking out in advance particular genes, but dealing with the whole lot in one way or another, as best you can. We were learning to do this throughout the '80s, until we came to the point -- particularly Bob Waterston and I -- working on the nematode, where we were ready to start sequencing, picking out the whole information from the worm. That then quickly led us into the human, because we were doing well at the sequencing of the worm. So we got drawn into this huge thing. Within half a decade, I found myself directing 500 people, where previously I'd directed one or two, including me. But you see what I mean? I had no doubts about that, about doing that, because this was a role, a technique, a skill, that I needed to take on in order to do this. Increasingly, as we went forward, I realized that I did want to be part of it, because we wanted to do it right. We wanted to make this public and not allow the space for somebody to come in and grab it for themselves for private purposes. Because it's very clear this should be done in this public way. So I had a big learning experience, had to go up a big learning curve about it. But I didn't feel in doubt that that was the right way to go. So in that sense, the decision was easy. I didn't agonize about should I be a director or not. I just said, "Okay, that's what I gotta do, I'll do that now."

This question may be especially relevant to what you have been doing. What is the ethical responsibility of the scientist in his work?

John Sulston: I think it's something that we have to deal with both individually and collectively.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. There are some obvious ethical responsibilities in science, which is simply to be honest, you know, and to publish correctly. Not to conceal facts and you need not to invent facts. But occasionally people do, and they have to be weeded out by the system, which works fairly well because of the openness. It means everybody can see what's been published. If it's an exciting, very novel sort of result, then many people want to check it, or may, indeed, may want to try and disprove it. There's always this knocking down effect. So they will quickly be uncovered. So that works.

[ Key to Success ] Integrity

The broader ethical consideration -- which I think is particularly important now, in the matter of the genome project -- is the issue of public and private science, and the way we apply the discoveries of science.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. It's become rather unfashionable of late to talk about a distinction between the discovery process of science -- which some people call "pure science," but I don't like it, because it's got a sort of pejorative/anti-pejorative way -- let's call it the discovery process of science on the one hand, and the applications of science on the other. Now the reason for saying there is no distinction is clear: that normally these two processes go on side by side. People will be discovering things, and if they have a chance, they'll be applying them. But what's been happening increasingly, in the last 20 years or so, in the richer countries of the world, is that the application process, more and more, has been driving the discovery. That's been setting the agenda, number one; and number two, is that that which we discover, our funders expect us to exploit. Okay. It's the nature of bringing more of a market element into science. Now in many ways, there's nothing wrong with that, and certainly no scientist should hold back from useful applications of their work. I'm not saying that one should be purist. That's why I don't like that term, "pure science." But what we should be aware of is that whilst all discovery is good, in the sense that it increases our knowledge -- and I mean that very literally; there is no such thing as bad discovery -- there may be bad ways of doing discovery. That's a different matter. But as long as the actual process hasn't involved torturing people or animals or something, we find out things. It's always good to know. But now not all of the discoveries -- and this is increasingly true in biology -- not all of the discoveries ought to be applied. And too, we need to have that gate of public interest, of public opinion, between those two. We should not apply discovery simply because it's going to lead to a marketable product. That's wrong. We should apply discoveries because they are good for society and good for people. And it's mixing the two up and thinking that what we have discovered, we must exploit immediately, as fast as possible, which is going wrong.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. We need to find a new way of conducting ethics. But I don't think this can be done just on the level of the individual scientist. After all, we're all people. We get hired to do this or that. We, after all, owe a duty of delivery to our bosses, our funders. So you cannot leave it to the individual to decide whether or not an application is ethical. This must be done in a societal way, a democratic way. What it means in practice is that we should have good, constantly evolving, thought-out regulations about how we handle biological products. About how we produce drugs, which drugs we produce, how we deliver the drugs. In the case of my own field, I'm thinking, the practical output is healthcare, and I think we should be heading towards universal healthcare as fast as we can. We're not doing that at the moment. We're fighting all the time. We're putting most of our resources into more drugs for the rich countries and none at all for the poor. The so-called "neglected disease" problem. The fact that 90 percent of the world's disease burden receives only 10 percent of the research effort. That's simply, to me, ethically unacceptable. But no individual can do anything about it. All we can do is to feed into the democratic process and say, "Look, we just have to fix the world differently," and all scientists will actually agree, so long as they're given the opportunity to join in.

[ Key to Success ] Vision

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