We used it to do metal binding to see how metals bound to nucleic acids, which we knew at the time. And I remember somebody in the lab objecting to all this, Peter Lawrence. Peter Lawrence was a gad fly in the laboratory, a very distinguished cell biologist. And he... he said, why... we gave a talk in the lab and said... 'Why do you, why are you doing this, why do we need to know this?' And I said, 'Well, metals are important biology, RNAs important, metal RNA interactions are important, this is an opportunity to follow this up and to see how they work'. He was the same as an... he was the same... was in the same year Fred Sanger talked about sequencing DNA, this is the same Peter Lawrence. And he got up and Fred was describing the methods for which he got his second Nobel Prize; Fred was describing these methods and afterwards with Peter... and said, again... again he said the same thing, this was some time later, 'Why do we need to know this; What will the sequence tell us?' It went on biological action. So after the session Francis Crick walked up to him, put his arm on his shoulder and he said, 'One day, dear boy, you'll have to know.' The sequence of DNA.

It's really... I tell this story because it gives back a kind of echo of what we were doing. In a way, if I can make a general comment, we were creating I think, some of us... some of us in... you and us... in the various other groups were creating modern structural molecular biology. But in order to do this you had to not just bring in the physical and chemical techniques but you had to steep yourself or really try to steep yourself in the biological and biochemical backgrounds, which not everybody did, I think. Well, Francis is the prime example of all this because he... he didn't even... hadn't done any biology or biochemistry when he started and he was purely a physics degree. I know I at least had done biochemistry and physiology, so I knew something about it.