When I graduated, Helen Spurway, Haldane's wife, given me a great mass of data she'd collected and saying 'Look, these data really look strange and I can't make sense of them, but if you can make sense of them then we could publish them together.' And I looked at them for a bit, and I thought, 'Well, I don't want to look at Helen's data, I want to discover my own things, you know.' But the data must have stuck in my mind. And about a year later there was a paper in Nature by Bruno Pontecorvo, on the white locus in Drosophila, showing that the linear sructure... the linear arrangements of mutations in the white locus, in Drosophila, judged entirely from genetic breeding data, recombination and so on. And I can remember to this day, sitting there, and thinking, 'Oh, that's what Helen's data means, that Helen had the perfect data demonstrating the linear structure of a gene, but she hadn't seen what it meant, I hadn't seen what it meant.' And I thought, you know, it's just... we all find ourselves in this situation, there are more things we didn't discover than we did. But there, I had the data in my hands and I didn't... didn't see the point. But I think, you know, it doesn't matter, I guess.

[Q] There are have got to be things staring us in the face now that will be important in the future.

Yeah, that's a good... another parlour game one can try, you know, what is it that everybody in this room knows, or at least all the biologists in this room know, which if only we realised was important, we could get the next Nobel Prize? There must be things like that out there, but they're so hard to spot, aren't they, you know, until somebody tells you, and then you feel an idiot.