I gave up further work on tRNA, Brian Clark had moved, had gone to Aarhus, so we had done protein synthesis in the laboratory was being wound down anyway by... by Crick and Brenner.
[Q] It was the time for chromatin...
So I turned to chromatin.
[Q] Yes.
And I'd come to chromatin only because of the time to start, but I was, when I wrote a report to say one of our, you know, at the MRC we get examined every five years and I wrote in our division report that the work had stopped on tRNA was heavily criticised by one of the referees and by the visiting committee. They were saying, why did you do this, the first discoveries of the structure of tRNA and a lot of things to be found out, the interactions of tRNA with EFTU, other molecules. And I said, 'Well, we stopped something and we want to do something else and it was chromatin.' So I judged the chromatin to be much more of a mystery.
[Q] Yes.
And so what happened was that when Roger Kornberg wanted to come to the lab as a Post Doc, he was the son of Arthur Kornberg, the greatest biochemist of the day, and he said, 'I'd like to work on a... something messy, starting at the beginning'. And I said, 'Well, I've got a messy problem for you – chromatin, where the chemistry is not well understood.' And that was... that was Roger Kornberg. Yeah. So... so... And we moved on, the pointers I'd learnt which some people don't learn that sometimes you have to deny yourself the luxury of doing something, not following what you're capable of doing but to try to work on interesting and hopefully important problems, which I think... I think I learned that from Francis Crick. And I think, looking back on it, I was very lucky to be there because I learnt... from Crick as he once wrote about Bragg. He wrote in his thesis that he was fortunate to have learnt from [Lawrence] Bragg how to go about a problem. Well, I learnt, I read that in Francis Crick's thesis and I also learnt from him, well... by watching him, how he thought, in fact. He would always write out notes, he'd write down a whole, he was very systematic, he would write down a whole lot of notes about how to approach a problem. He wrote down... when he and [James] Watson worked on DNA, to return to an old historical thing. He wrote down helical diffraction three for bird watchers because Watson was only a bird watcher and didn't understand this. So I think, it was pretty important, Crick... So he was... we didn't publish much together but he was a... he was an influence. And then the lab as a whole meant, and I think I have to get this into the story, the lab as a whole was such a representation of techniques and when we worked on RNA and later on we were able to learn from people like Fred Sanger. When we worked on chromatin we had to go and... so I'm now speaking more generally, we had to start using nuclei, micro nuclease, DNAs 1 and so on; we learnt that from Fred Sanger.
[Q] Yes.
And not only that he actually gave us some materials; we didn't have to go through the business of ordering it and knowing what to order. So it's really... so the laboratory, and it's a tribute to the MRC, which I must get into this talk that they actually favoured such conditions where you had an institute rather, where workers were perhaps in different departments but under one roof and you could benefit even if only occasionally from the presence of the others.
[Q] A variety of know-how...
A variety of know-how, yes... you could always go down and ask, well, you could always read papers, but there's nothing like knowing you're getting some know-how, yes.
