Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Brenner and model organisms in science

I ordered Sydney Brenner: A Biography (by Errol Friedberg) from Barnes&Noble on March 10 and the book arrived today, just in time to celebrate Katy’s birthday; it is always a joyful day for birthday or when the book arrives.  With that many books I bought I tried not to buy the book paying the full price.  This is the exception: $33.19 (after the 10% promotional discount that day) for a small book of about 300 pages. 

As I mentioned in other post I came across a book review for this book in Science while looking for Miao-Chih’s article.  The reviewer likens Brenner to Richard Feynman in Biology; a comparison that I agree.  Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman was a gift to me from my daughter.

When Watson&Crick constructed that famous DNA model at Cavendish Lab (at Cambridge U.) in April 1953, Sidney Brenner (originally from South Africa, born of a Jewish family) was in Oxford University; he went Cambridge to see it.  And that was the beginning of the long togetherness of Crick and Brenner.  They were together at Woods Hole Lab and Cold Spring Harbor Lab in 1954.  Brenner joined Crick at Cavendish Lab in 1956 and “spent 20 years sharing an office”.  Crick moved to Salk Institute at La Jolla, California in 1976 and Brenner rejoined him there in 2001.

Brenner began to work on the ‘elegant’ C. elegans (Caenorhabditis elegans) in late 1950s that led him to elucidate the mechanism of apoptosis (cell death).  In his Nobel Lecture in 2002, “Nature’s Gift to Science” he said, “Without the doubt the fourth winner of the Nobel Prize this year is Caenorhabditis elegans; it deserves all of the honor but, of course, it will not be able to share the monetary award.”

Two persons shared the Nobel Prize with Brenner in 2002 and both, of course, worked on C. elegans.  H. Robert Horvitz, MIT & Harvard-trained, went to work with Brenner at Cambridge.  If I am not mistaken, one of Miao-Chih’s (my niece) professor at National Taiwan University worked under H. Robert Horvitz at MIT.

Brenner made C. elegans a model organism to study genetics.  It is a nematode, about 1000 cells in all, with 302 cells in nervous system; its genome is only 20 times that of E. coli.  It must be also an “old friend” of Miao-Chih on her days at Cambridge U.  I guess one cannot go through Cambridge U. without befriending the elegant C. elegans if one is in the field of life science.

Another model organism of Nobel Prize fame is squid.  Upon receiving the Nobel Prize in Medicine for establishing the ionic mechanism of excitation and inhibition of nerve conduction in 1963, Alan Huxley said the prize should have gone to the squid whose giant axons made their experiments possible.

Alan Hodgkin had one year stint (1937-1938) at Rockefeller Institute, during which he spent several weeks at Woods Hole Lab, where he learned the trick of dissecting the giant squid axon.  This was not the only thing he achieved in just one year; he managed to woo the daughter of Peyton Rous, who was then a pathologist at Rockefeller Institute.  Hodgkin married Rous’s daughter when he returned to the States during the war time in 1944.

If one is the student of medicine one got to know the Rous sarcoma virus (RSV)—the first tumor-inducing virus discovered.  Hodgkin got his Nobel in 1963, three years later it was his father-in-law’s turn (almost 40 years after he discovered the virus now bears his name).  It must be a family affair to go to Stockholm.

Another model organism that deserves a Nobel Prize is Aplysia; I have a photo to prove it (photo credit: Eric Kandel’s In Search of Memory).  While Kandel was receiving his Nobel Prize in Medicine for elucidation of the molecular mechanism of memory, one of his graduate students (at Columbia U.) emailed him a photo showing a proud Aplysia with a Nobel Prize medal draped around its neck.  The audience broke out in laughter; the Aplysia might have earned louder applause than Kandel did.