It seems a major turning point in your career was when you came to the United States, as a graduate of Cambridge University, to do postdoctoral work in San Diego. How important was that to you and what was that experience like? John Sulston: Oh, that was tremendous. I mean, that really was a bursting out. It was leaving my country that I'd grown up in. I was more hidebound by it than one realizes.
When you've lived in one country all your life, then you have a set of rules, a set of social etiquette that you live by. And you have no idea how narrow those are until you move. And moving, at that time, from England to the west coast of California, really was going into something very different in terms of the way society ran. Of course, not that difficult a transition because of the language, but nevertheless, a big change. And the other thing was the sense of being given, now, a very long rein. Up to that point I'd been quite organized. My supervisor had pretty much laid out the style of work. But now, suddenly, I was with somebody who just wanted to open it all up and encouraged me to think more broadly. And that was Leslie Orgel, because that was the style of his operation. And also, the style of the subject. Because the work was about the origin of life, which is a very big, very open topic. Nobody knows what the conditions are -- were, rather -- on the primitive earth. And therefore, you don't even know what all the parameters are. And so the aim is to contribute to finding that out. So it's a very, as one might say, a "polymathematic" sort of subject, where you can think anything and it may be relevant. You ought to have to try to think about all of it. Now, I'm not very good at that, he is. He has a much larger intelligence than I would ever aspire to. But to be part of his group doing this was tremendously mind-expanding. And, I think, also, it confirmed me in the idea that all I really wanted to do was to carry on doing science in some form. Because I was able to do anything, I was obviously choosing to do science. What you choose to do when you have a completely free choice is obviously what you should do, because that's what you're interested in.
Is that where you first encountered the worm? John Sulston: No. That came later? John Sulston: That came next. How did you get your first job?
The way you write about it, this first postgraduate position was utterly by chance. You didn't know what you were going to do and you saw something, you applied for it, and to your great surprise you got it. Is that right? John Sulston: Well, it was more being passed on, in a way. Of course, I had some volition. I wasn't forced to do it. When I came from England to California, what led to that was the connection between my graduate supervisor, Colin Reese, who was a colleague of Leslie Orgel. I think there was actually a previous graduate student who went the same route as me. So it was a kind of channel that was available. Sir Colin said to me, "Would you be interested in going to work for Leslie, if he wants you?" And I said, "Oh sure, why not. We might as well go to California. Why not?" Actually, there was a reason, as well. I had been educated as a chemist, yet I knew I wanted to do something in biology. This idea of working in prebiotic chemistry, the origin of life, was attractive. So definitely there was something there. But at that stage, and it's true in general for people doing their first postdoc, you don't have to worry too much because you can develop your science out of that if you want to, or you can just treat it as an episode, and then go on and do something else. In my case, it sort of was the second. I went on and did something else. I did have more than one offer.
One or two people had mentioned to me that they'd be very happy to offer me a position in their labs. These were in America, because there were a lot of jobs around at that time. This was the mid-to-late '60s. And so people saw me working away. I got some publications from both the groups I'd been in. People thought, "Oh well, tie in. Why not?" And so I could have had opportunities, but we both wanted to go back to England, because our parents were there, and sort of a sense of roots. My wife was keen to go back. So we were particularly interested when this offer came in from Cambridge, from Sydney Brenner, who was starting work on the nematode worm Caenorhabditis. And that really was the beginning of a much more important phase, to me, or at least long-lasting phase. This was working on the worm. And that was a chance, and it had to be by chance, because nobody knew about this worm. There was no publication record, really. There was some old publications, but nothing new. Sydney Brenner was really starting at almost from scratch to make this into an important biological system of finding out how animals work. And so I came in -- I only came in for a year to start with -- and then at the end of the year, he said, "Do you want to stay?" And I said, "Oh yeah, sure. Why not?" At least we were doing something. And then eventually, having achieved some things, I was given a tenured position. And that, if you like, was -- finally -- the proper job. Because when you have tenure, then you can stay as long as you like. But by that time I was very far dug into the worm. I had lots of lines of research going on, which I was enjoying, and it was just obvious to carry on working on those.
When you started out, could you have imagined that you would spend 30 years studying the nematode worm? John Sulston: Oh no. One doesn't think in that way.
There was one moment, in particular, where I remember asking whether I ought to do what I was doing. But it wasn't working on the worm as a whole, it was following a cell lineage. There came a point, because one of the things that I learned to do, and became my sort of identification for a while, with the worm, was looking to see how the first cell divides to two. Each of those divide again to get the pattern of cell divisions. It sounds pretty unimportant, but the key thing is that one wants that pattern to provide the map, as it were, onto which we are going to place the gene activities. Because in the end, something develops, as we do, from a single cell, through lots and lots of cell divisions to multiple cells, through a whole series of signals, of controls. We wanted to find out what those controls were. People were doing it in other organisms, too. People were looking at the fruit fly, for example, very productively. But the worm had its own particular power, which is that you could follow the cell lineage, because it was constant from one out to about a thousand cells, when the thing is finally mature. So I, along with some colleagues, followed that process. And I came to a point where I knew that I had all the techniques I needed to finish the most difficult part of it, which was looking to see what happened in the egg. But I also could calculate that it was going to take me one and a half years of just sitting every day and looking down the microscope. I talked to John White about it -- he was my colleague working on the anatomy of the worm -- and I said to John, "Is it worthwhile? Do I really have to spend a year and a half looking down the microscope?" John said, "Yes, you can do it. You should do it. We need it." And so, with that sort of encouragement from him, Bob Horvitz and others, I just did it. But that was a moment when you said, "Well, is it really worthwhile doing what I'm doing? And I couldn't be certain, and lots of people were a little skeptical. But anyway, I did it, and it turned out to be a useful body of knowledge.
Was there ever a Eureka moment? A moment when it struck you, "This is going to tell us something!" John Sulston: No, no. It grew up bit by bit.
In a way, the Eureka moment came earlier. It was a very small Eureka, but this was when I first saw that I could watch these cell divisions in the living worm. That was the key thing. Many people had looked to try to follow this cell lineage for a whole century, actually, because nematodes have been important and people have looked at them. There was lots of work in Germany a hundred years ago. But they just couldn't go to the limit. They could not, in the end, find out which cells came from which. So when I was able to actually follow a cell division and realize that could give us the whole picture, there was that sense of Eureka. So it wasn't a Eureka of understanding life, but it was a Eureka of knowing I had a viable technique. See? That shows how nerdy I am! I'm a techniques person, really.
During the course of any scientific inquiry, there must be setbacks. Are there any that stand out in your memory, and how did you deal with them?
John Sulston: There were setbacks. And the thing is, of course, one mostly talks about the things that worked. When you have a real setback, where something won't work -- and one line, for example, which I was following in parallel with this cell lineage business, was to try to use monoclonal antibodies. Cesar Milstein and his co-workers had just invented this monoclonal antibody. It was in lab, where we were, so you can imagine everybody in lab wanted to use it. This was a fantastic new technique. So we were all growing cell lines and making these antibodies, which could mark cells. You see, we could construct these markers to particular products of the body -- of the worm, in our case -- and thereby mark cells and follow through and find out how particular products were produced, and where. And I became very interested in this as well, and I tried to do it. And in the end, it just obviously wasn't going anywhere, as far as I was concerned. There were some other things that other people were doing. But my own particular line just didn't work. So in the end there comes a point where you say, "Well, this line isn't productive for me. I should be doing this other." Which in my case was the cell lineage. And you just clear out your freezer and throw it all away. You have to do that.
I think it's a personal balance. Some people are more obstinate and will pursue things for a long way. I know in the case of the cell lineage, people thought I was very obstinate, pursuing it as far as I did. Because many other people were having trouble, so they got stuck. So I guess you also have to have the humility to say, "Well, this is something I personally can do. I'm not getting anywhere with this, but I must follow the line I can do." You're always sort of exploring. It's a game. A society of sorts, comes in very much.
Even though much of science is done by the individual, the progress is societal. And I've always felt -- maybe this is an important part of my own philosophy of it -- I've always felt very much that although I love to get some individual recognition; it's very nice when people pat you on the back and say, "There's a good job!" -- at the same time, I've never felt that anything I was doing stood alone. It only worked because it was in conjunction with other people in terms of sharing the results. So once you see it that way, the blockage is not such a disaster, because so long as you can continue to contribute to the whole progress in a powerful way, then you're very happy, because somebody else can take on what you failed to do yourself. Okay? So it's the combination of individuality and collective endeavor, which I think makes failure much more tolerable. Because it gets in a natural way incorporated into the whole thing.
May we talk about your childhood? What was it like and what were you like?
John Sulston: Well, like everybody, I don't have accurate memories, but what I do know, my early memories are certainly of being an amateur scientist in some sense. Of just fiddling around and trying to understand things. Taking to pieces and trying to put them back together again with more or less success. So I think I was actually, actually, really wanting to go on that scientific path. And I had no idea where it was going. It was just in me somehow.
What were your parents like?
John Sulston: My parents were very encouraging of me. They wanted me to have a good education, clearly, but they were not worldly ambitious in any way. My father was an Anglican priest and my mother a schoolteacher. So they had exactly the sorts of qualities that I would value, and maybe it's because of them I value them. Who knows? So I led an easy childhood in a certain way, and was let to carry on and follow my own wishes, really, in what I wanted to do, and was encouraged. But they certainly set high standards in terms of achievement. I was expected not just to play, but to go to school and work, and pass exams. So I had... a strong work imperative as well, I think, was put in there.
Do any important lessons come to mind that you learned from your parents?
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?
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.
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?
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.
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. What was hard for you growing up? John Sulston: Growing up? Well, I mentioned religion. That was hard. Perhaps to illustrate the hardness...
When I went to university and one had student discussions, as one does, and I remember saying to people -- over the endless drinks and coffee and so on, in the evenings -- I would say to people, I said the most important thing I had to do in my life was to decide whether or not I believed in God. And most of them just looked at me blankly and they said, "Huh? What's important about that?" That they had not experienced this. They had not been given the religious upbringing. So it was just something they were aware of. It was not the starting point, it was just something else. So that was -- I had to deal with it because of my father. And I must say, like all adolescents, I worried terribly about my relationships with other people, especially with girls. Again, this is just the story of adolescence, nothing special. One has to go through it and find out how one is, how one can cope with other people.
But you survived it. John Sulston: I apparently survived, yeah, in very good shape. We know you went to Cambridge University. What was most important about that experience?
Could you have been a lighting director for the West End stage? John Sulston: I think I didn't have the talent for it, but I enjoyed it when I did it. It was fun. You're creating something which is incredibly important at the time, and yet which is also, of course, completely ephemeral, because when you've created that, then you go on and do another one. It has that sense of the huge, but transitory, importance. Which is rather different from the process of science, where it's more like building up bricks, putting things on top of one another and building a wall. It's a very different, complementary experience. When did you first know what you wanted to do? John Sulston: Oh well, this really goes back to the early days.
It was just following this idea of inquiry about the natural world. So it was a question of deciding -- or rather putting off deciding -- which piece of science I would be involved in. I just wanted to do it all. I think it was a series of chance events, and I think there's nothing wrong in that. You have a very general direction, but it's the opportunities that come your way to do this or that, that you have to seize, and that will in turn decide what you're going to do. I have little belief, in terms of giving advice, about saying to people, "Well, you should really think it through and this will be the correct career path." I think that's a mistake. I think you should take things as they come. Certainly seize your opportunities, and you need to be rather open, I think, about the range of prospects. Because after all, the things that you know about now, the things that you can predict, are basically over and done with. You can fill in a few gaps. But what you really should be thinking about, or waiting to think about, is the thing you cannot predict now. That's why you have to be open -- but not completely random walking -- about your process.
We've heard you mention openness, communication. Does science require an open society? John Sulston: It does. I think it absolutely does, and in a strange way, especially in our society today, which I think is being driven too much towards possessiveness in a sort of literal and figurative sense. We have a need to cost everything and own things, and so on. Ideas, now, are being patented and all this kind of thing. I think this is extremely counterproductive. It actually makes life harder and I don't think it's the progressive route. I think science, actually, in a strange way, can offer a kind of morality about this, because it works when you share a lot of basic knowledge. It absolutely rewards and respects those who manage to make progress, but you do it through publication and through acclaim. You don't do it through paying people more. You do it because people are part of a common cause, and the result is the morality of the openness, and you have a sense, always, of the future. What motivates you? What inspires you? What moves you to do what you do?
John Sulston: It's broad and narrow. Broadly, there's no question, my whole life, I've been inspired by the advance of understanding. So that includes two components. One is just factual knowledge, because we find out things, we observe and so on. The other, of course, is to integrate and to understand how things work. That's harder. And not everybody does that. Nevertheless, we can all contribute as part of this growth. And I just... looking back, more and more, sometimes when I'm talking, I like to go back and remind people of what happened 400 years ago -- the cosmology. A hundred-fifty years ago -- evolution. Things like this, which really affect the human condition. The way we think about ourselves. These are not technological advances, these are philosophical advances. They completely affect the way we think about ourselves and ourselves in the universe. And we're going to do a lot more of this. For example, we're all talking a lot now about how we're going to understand much more about the brain. I'm sure that's true. We don't know how far we can take it. We don't know how long it'll take. We're going to understand a lot more about the brain. That's going to be very challenging. Because that really is the innermost part of being human. But this progression of understanding -- which I feel is so amazing -- and to be part of this is great. So that's a broad motivation. The narrow motivation that everybody needs is to get that pat on the back from their peers, I think. So you can have satisfaction in knowing you've contributed something to the whole, but I think there's very few people who are free of this desire, and love, really, of having their peers acclaim them. And so I think that's an important part of it as well. And the two together make for a wonderful collective of people working.
Does history matter, in science? John Sulston: History matters in a certain sense, not so much in science. History matters only in the sense that you have a firm basis for what you know. It doesn't actually matter how that came about. The progress of science and the individual motivations actually are quite messy. I've given you mine, but others may have different ones. Rivalry certainly plays a part. I would like to think it doesn't play so much part in mine, but certainly there have been times when intense rivalries have driven people. But none of that matters. It doesn't matter how it came about. All that matters is that the final result is documented clearly, is open to criticism, and therefore if it stands that criticism, is a solid part of the whole. So one always advances. What role does philosophy play in what you do?
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.
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?
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.
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?
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. What was your reaction to winning the Nobel Prize?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Either generally, or in your particular field, what characteristics or traits do you think are most important for achieving success? Satisfaction, achievement, whatever you call it.
John Sulston: In one's life, in one's work, I think one must not have too set an idea about where you're going. It's more important to enjoy and believe in what you're doing now than to worry about where ultimately it's going. You should not, for example, set your eye on getting a prize, on getting a promotion. You should enjoy the process of what you're doing. And then, if you do succeed in getting some sort of acclaim, then of course you're doubly rewarded. That you both enjoyed the job and you get the acclaim. If you don't get the acclaim, then at least you've enjoyed the job. I think there can be nothing more miserable than to have neither. So I would always say to somebody, "Go the way that you believe in," and for a thinking person, of course, they won't just do something because it's fun, they will also want to feel there's something important. So it's that sense of going for what you enjoy, or going for what's important, which really matters. And that will give you, I'm sure, a satisfying life.
If one of the young people at this Summit came to you and said, "Sir John, what is your advice?" What would you say?
John Sulston: It's do what you want. Do what you think is important. I'm just saying, in another way, what most scientists who've reached a certain point in their career and asked the same questions say. Francis Crick famously called it the gossip test. He said the thing to do is to work on what you find you're gossiping about. So it's not what you think theoretically you ought to be working on, it's what you actually go and chat to people about. This obviously is what you care about. This is what you ought to be doing. It's good advice, I think, from Francis, and I say the same.
What haven't you done that you would like to do? John Sulston: Almost everything. The hard part about doing anything is that there's a zillion other things that you're not doing. So the problem with choice is what you have to give up in order to do one thing. One quickly realizes that if you don't make a choice, then you'll never do anything. You can't advance on all fronts at once. There's some that have to be left for other people, as it were.
I would have liked to have been a physiologist. I would have liked to have been a physicist. I think I would love to be a space engineer. I would like to travel in space. I would like to go to Mars. I remember being so excited when I saw the first lander on Mars, I said, "I want a one-way ticket. I'm quite happy. Just give me supplies for six months. I'll spend six months on Mars and then die, that's fine, I don't care." I think I was serious, but, of course, I was not in a position to do it anyway. But the point that I'm making, I think, and this illustrates, is that everything we do is an exploration. Everything we do that's fun, it's absolutely in the nature of the human being to explore. So whether you explore inside, outside, whatever, it's just all exploration. But I think I do have a sense that I want us to go out there. I think it's so important that we travel. We go out away from earth, as soon as possible, actually. We really should put effort into that. I would like to be part of that. But it's not for me now.
In looking ahead to the 21st century, what do you see as the greatest challenge we face? John Sulston: Ourselves. It's ourselves, our relationship with one another. Not individually, but in the blocs, particularly the blocs we call nation-states. We have to sort this out. We're actually at a very, very critical position in human history, indeed, possibly in the history of life on earth. We don't know whether that's true or not, to make such a large statement.
I think it may well be that we are the only intelligent life in the universe. We certainly have no evidence that there's any other intelligent life. It may be that we have a very, very precarious and crucial role here. Now it's interesting to talk with people about that. Many people say, "Well, we're bad people. It'd be just as well if humanity didn't survive, because it does bad things all the time." I think doing bad things some of the time is an inevitable part of our intelligence. You know, we get excited, people get ambitious, we form groups, we therefore form opposing groups, we get into trouble. We've got more and more power. We've got more and more ability to make explosions, or to do other nasty things to one another, maybe biologically. All of these dangers are going to increase, and at the moment, we are not moving towards a resolution of this. We're not seeing from our leaders a sense that we are really coming together. Quite the reverse. All we hear are words of hostility. We hear about, for example, "the war on terrorism." What a ridiculous statement! War on terrorism? What are they talking about? They don't know what they're talking about. They are just seeing something which they perceive as a short-term risk and trying to make it into something larger. We desperately need to bring humanity together to overcome these real difficulties of security. But if we don't do it pretty soon, if we don't do it during this century, then we are not going to survive. Because some rogue person, rogue state as it's put, or some huge clash of opposing blocs that we risked during the last century, during the Cold War, will finally put paid to human life. Now as I say, some people say, "Oh, that doesn't matter. That's a failed experiment." The point is, it may never come back.
First of all, we don't know what the chance of producing this kind of intelligence that we have was, how it was produced by evolution. We have no idea. Secondly, if there is another intelligent form of life, and there are sort of -- you know, there's other primates, there's the cetaceans and so on -- there are some bits of life on earth that might evolve. But they're not going to have such an easy time of it. We've used up all the easy ores, or the easy sources of energy, and the next one along is not going to have such an easy time of it. So it's not just becoming intelligent, it's also a matter of getting out of the Stone Age into the Iron Age, into the technological age, or rebuilding our knowledge. We are at a point now which is so precious, and if we could just hold onto that and think of that as being something that's worthwhile. Just really survival of the human race. If we could begin to have that mindset collectively, then I think that would be the huge achievement to the next century. I don't know what the chances are. Martin Rees says it's 50/50, just wrote a book about it, which I think is a very important signal that we may be about to destroy ourselves. But we have the opportunity to avoid that fate.
A sobering thought. Thank you very much.
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