John Sulston
John Sulston
Sir John Edward Sulston FRSis a British biologist. For his work on the cell lineage and genome of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, he was jointly awarded the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Sydney Brenner and Robert Horvitz. As of 2014 he is Chair of the Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation at the University of Manchester...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth27 March 1942
charities good medicines
Biomedical research is only as good as its delivery. Distribution of medicines by charities is no more than a stopgap.
life
If we understand the worm, we understand life.
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I wandered along to the chemistry labs, more or less on the rebound, and asked about becoming a research student. It was the '60s, a time of university expansion: the doors were open, and a 2:1 was good enough to get me in.
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An awful lot of food is thrown away. This you can call a spillover. It doesn't sort of enter into our economic system because it's a consequence of running things in a highly competitive way: the free market, global pricing and so on.
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Muriel, my mother, was my main confidant. She was a teacher of English at Watford grammar school but took a break while my sister Madeleine and I were children. She held court in the kitchen, and we talked about everything.
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The only thing I have retained from my upbringing - I did not retain the religious element - is the idea that you do not do things for money.
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When results are shared freely amongst the biological community, as has been done for the worm and the Human Genome Projects, specialist scientists can move much more rapidly towards their goals.
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You have to say - and I do - that anything that blocks that cheapest possible point-of-care delivery of health is wrong.
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We knew that all the protein-coding bits of genes do is to produce protein - they have to have instructions to turn them on and off. Those sequences lie well outside the protein-coding sequences, sometimes thousands, tens of thousands of bases away.
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Title deeds establish and protect ownership of our houses, while security of property is as important to the proprietors of Tesco and Sainsbury's as it is to their customers.
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When it came to choice of subjects, science was obvious - since I was uninterested in anything else - but a decision that caused consternation in some eyes was my demand to take biology for A-level.
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We can choose to address the twin issues of population and consumption to rebalance the use of resources to a more egalitarian pattern of consumption.
human
What is the purpose of being human and alive without doing new things?
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The fact is that proprietary databases don't work for such basic and broadly needed information as the sequence of the human genome.