The code of life. The great scientists in their own words.

This programme brings together some of the historical footage held in the BBC which was originally broadcast on television or radio and features some of the luminaries who worked on the discovery of DNA and its applications. Many of the scientists speak candidly about their work and rivalries within the field. The BBC recorded Erwin Schrödinger in 1949 musing on biological matters (he was a physicist). He was a contemporary of Einstein (as illustrated by a photograph). Professors Lisa Jardine and Steve Jones, UCL, comment on his impact as a scientist and physicist. His book, 'What is Life?', was also influential in understanding the nature of heredity; noted by Sir Paul Nurse. Schrödinger was based in Dublin and worked at Trinity College; he applied his physics training on entrophy and coding to the big questions in biology such as the 'secret' of life. Both Darwin and Mendel were influential early scientists in this field but their work led to the eugenics movement (a clip from the Wellcome Library/Galton Institute title 'Heredity in Man' is shown). Physicists contemporary to Schrödinger engaged in war work; they worked on weapons research. Maurice Wilkins worked on the atomic bomb in the US; after the war he joined Kings College London working on crystallography. Simple sugars were known to be components of DNA but the relationship between them was not known. Post war, in Cambridge, another ex-weapons designer - Francis Crick - was working in molecular biology. Jardine knew Crick as a child; she recounts how Crick developed a mine which targeted mine-sweepers. James Watson, who received his Phd at 22 arrived at Cambridge and met his scientific collaboraror Crick. Francis and Odile Crick hosted wild parties at Cambridge, as remembered by Jardine. Rosalind Franklin was hired by Wilkins to 'sharpen up' the crystallography photos that the lab at King's had taken. Unfortunately, Franklin arrived at the lab and the working relationship between her and Wilkins was not good. Raymond Gosling was her research assistant and remembers the tension. Both Crick and Watson who were working on the same issue were considered to be 'butterflies' but it emerged that they were very well connected in terms of meeting other scientists in Cambridge - a chance meetng with John Griffiths gave Crick a breakthrough. They caught wind that Linus Pauling was working on the same problem in the US. Watson visited Wilkins in London and had a tense encounter with Franklin. During his meeting with Wilkins, Watson was inadvertantly shown some of the crystallographs and discovered that there were two different A form and B form crystallograph pictures and the second picture was clearly a helix to Watson's eyes. This led to the famous model and the 1953 paper. This was a critical moment in science, although it hardly featured in the public's imagination. The BBC commissioned a programme, 'The Prizewinners' in 1962 after Wilkins, Watson and Crick received the Nobel prize. Franklin never shared in the Nobel prize - she died of ovarian cancer in 1958. South African researcher, Sydney Brenner, came to the UK and worked on the 'coding problem'; how DNA replicated itself. He collaborated with Crick. Fred Sanger pioneered the method of sequencing DNA; he earned a Nobel prize for his work. John Sulston received a Nobel prize for cataloguing every cell in the nemotode; he sequenced every gene (his lack of materialism is amply illustrated by his shabby kitchen) . This became a proof of concept for reading the human genome. He reminisces about the famous 'Bermuda Talks' which scoped the Bermuda Principles. Craig Venter, from the US, broke from the 'gentlemanly' principles of Bermuda. Sulston acelerated the research in the UK so that Venter could not profit from the research and 'patent' any of the genes. Sulston appeared on 'Desert Island Discs' - he confesses to being a bit pleased with his success in achieving this.