We solved the structure of tRNA, Jane, by this time John Robertus, a Post Doc from the States had joined us and also Jane...
[Q] Ladner.
Jane Ladner, yes, but she had... her maiden name was... she was really Jane Ladner by this time. And she had... And she grew... she actually succeeded in growing good crystals, four-, three-dimensional crystals of tRNA. She was actually trying to grow a mixture, I mean a tRNA with something else but it... what happens, one of the species crystallised out, she was trying to see interactions between them. And so John Robertus and you, John... solved the crystal structure, didn't you? And John Robertus who had come to do something else.
[Q] Yes.
He had been... he had been a, he'd been trained as a psychologist but he wanted to go into chemistry... because he found psychology too frustrating. He was a very active fellow. And so the first crystal structure was published in 1974. Now, we were competing with Alex Rich, who was working on the very same... very same... species of tRNA. And he was a fast follower and he... and they had... they had an orthorhombic from; we had monoclinic form, which is simpler in some ways. Of course, there were troubles about the heavy atoms, I won't go into all the troubles, but, it took... until, I think Jane's crystals were published in 1972 and it took till '74 to solve it. I won't go into all the technical details of that. And the structure was a three dimensional folded structure, it had all sorts of interesting... non-Watson-Crick bases and so on. Alex Rich, thought he would steal a march on us... he published a paper at four angstroms, sometime ahead and he totally misinterpreted the map. They were... they because it was low resolution but they didn't understand that they actually were... the backbone of the molecule they traced went through certain base pairs and they got it all wrong and our paper was right. But he managed to... he managed to tell the world that they had done it at the same time, which wasn't true at all. It was a conference that went on in Madison and so on. I wasn't there but John Robertus and Brian Clark were there and they weren't quick witted enough to see that what he was presenting was our structure, not his. Anyway, so there's quite a lot of... quite a lot of unpleasantness in science. When I charged him with it on the telephone, he said to me, 'I'm not a saint'. He's not a saint, doesn't mean to say you're not a sinner.
[Q] Sung Ho Kim.
Yeah... Sung Ho Kim well... yeah, that, I didn't want to go into that whole story, Sung Ho Kim whatever happened... they disagreed about the high resolution model. Sung Ho Kim actually got it right but Alex preferred to... he had left Alex but the... Alex had worked with a chap who went... went to Alabama whose name I'll remember in a moment; And Alex published... the wrong choice. They couldn't... the map wasn't clear enough to see the chain tracing and they choose the wrong one. But it's really quite cunning, in the model he shows that there's a certain base pair of 1538, a non-Watson-Crick base pair, as some people described these GC non-Watson-Crick. And I knew the model had to be right because you, in many tRNAs you had AT and GC but never switched chains, so it had to be a non-Watson-Crick, not like this but like this, this is the glycosidic bond. So I knew that was right, I remember showing it to Francis and he said, 'Oh, it must be right.' But Alex, in the text, in the models he pub... in the text he says: later on it could also be the other way round, you see, covering his tracks. So that was tRNA.
