You know, Sydney described one or I forget... Sydney had the nonsense code answer for chain termination and Mario Capecchi, you know, guessed that in my lab we worked out nonsense suppression of them, so we were also competing with Fritz Lipmann lab at the Rockefeller, you know, trying to understand protein synthesis, about equal.

[Q] And the Tie Club? Was that tying everybody together?

Oh, that was much earlier.

[Q] That was dead by then.

That was the early period where the secret of life might lie in the structure of RNA and we would tell us all amino acids are lined up in proteins and it didn't at all. So the Tie Club was just a diversion from boredom when science isn't moving forward at all. It was my idea and then encouraged by Leslie Orgel, but then, when George Gamow saw it, it was he who made had the ties made, it was he who had the stationery, it was he who chose the members. So the Tie Club was, you know, a sort of one second idea of mine, you know, that you need clubs or occasions when people are forced to come together. I think that was the idea, that we were that you bring two people together who have sort of stopped thinking about what they should do next because they don't know what to do next and, if you start talking about what to do next, then it makes you think.

So I think that's why I find you know, I never think if I'm by myself. I might think if I'm, you know, reading a newspaper then a fact will come into your head, so something has to challenge you. If you're just left without anything new entering it, it's so easy to get into a rut, and so very easy to get into a rut, and it's something that's very hard to explain that even the brightest people for the most point are doing nothing, you know. One idea a year is really great if you think about it, you know, an idea which leads to an experiment, which changes the way you think about something. You're very lucky. Most years you do experiments but your fundamental ideas don't change.