One of the things that we had in our lab was a very large number of... of very... high level, dedicated, post-doctoral fellows, largely from America who came during this period to work on molecular genetics with us. And of course the suppressors and the, the tRNAs there were available for lots and lots of projects, and a large number of people cut their teeth on this and made themselves rather famous as a result of it. But it was part of the work that, you know, provided sustenance for the laboratory and such people, the people who worked on the tRNA from about '65 onwards were Howard Goodman, John Abelson, Malcolm Gefter and in fact Sidney Altman worked on this and Sidney Altman, through this, discovered the RNA processing, because what he found with many of the mutants is that they were blocked at the precursor stage. So he discovered the precursors of phage and of course that took him on to his later work on finding RNA processing and which awarded him the Nobel Prize with Tom Cech later. And that was one of the things that I think we did rather well in Cambridge, which was to have these fields and have people take them and work on them on their own, and each person to have a part of the project that he could run himself. And it taught people really how to do science, and of course had that very comforting thing that no one else in the world was working on it. And that's the greatest thing for all morale in the lab, because if you sit in a laboratory and you think, my God, there are 100 labs working on this project, each of these 100 labs have 40 people in them, that's 4000 to 1 I'm not going to win. Those are terrible odds, and that just means that no one does anything. But what is wonderful is to say, you know, this is exclusive, so to speak, at this stage, the science is, and we can do this without having the hordes come in and, and, you know, turn it into... industrialise it. Basically that's what I think happens in science is we now have managers, we now have a, a scientific/industrial complex, if you like, and so various topics are, are then industrialised, they're exploited to the hilt, and remarkably, they vanish. And I always used to say that the best thing in science is to work out of phase. That is, either half a wavelength ahead or half a wavelength behind. It doesn't matter. But if you're out of phase with the fashion you can do new things. But this I think was very important, at least for the lab, attracted a lot of people. For the first time they could combine genetics and function studied at the molecular level with RNA.
