The years in which Sydney Brenner shared an office with Francis Crick were times of endless talk, of sense and nonsense
book, rather than the natural world itself, that made Sydney Brenner want to be a scientist. He was so captivated by “The Science of Life”, by H.G. Wells, Julian Huxley and G.P. Wells, that rather than return it to the public library in Germiston, his South African birthplace, he paid a daunting two-shilling fine for losing it. Purloined in the 1930s, it was still with him in the 1990s.
Which is not to say that he was locked in silent study. Anything but. He was voluble, and mischievous. He joked, and harangued, and seemed rarely to let a thought go unexpressed. The years in which he shared an office with Crick in Cambridge were times of endless talk, of sense and nonsense; nothing, he would say, was too stupid to say. It was not a dictum to which he was true. He made plenty of people think that what they had said was indeed stupid. He mocked people; he wrote them off, too.
More to the point, Brenner and Crick developed a shared way of looking at the problem they faced: howtold cells to make proteins. Brenner had read papers by the mathematician John von Neumann from which he had taken the lesson that what was necessary for reproduction was a structure that contained within itself an account of how it could be made—the account, the finished structure and the means of its making being logically distinct.
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