SECOND PART

0:09:07 Became a fellow of King's in 1959; Noel Annan had wanted to get Crick as a fellow earlier but not successful; wanted someone from molecular biology and John Kendrew suggested me; was offered a fellowship at Churchill but preferred to try for King's and was elected; quite often had tea with Morgan Foster as a benefit of the college was to have friends outside science; other friends at King's included Francis Haskell, Michael Jaffe, and Dadie Rylands; Bernard Williams and Robert Bolgar; Edmund Leach, Meyer Fortes - always been fascinated by anthropology; did archaeology and palaeontology as a hobby; interested in creating a new anthropology which would include biology and the place of man in the animal world, the natural world and the world of our own creation; we may have the genome of Neanderthal man pretty soon

11:57:10 Originally we were housed in the Cavendish Laboratory; Crick very good at getting extra space and at the end of our time there we were in seven buildings on the site; prior to this the MRC had decided they might have a building somewhere but we did not want to be in a large place with everyone; got agreement for an MRC laboratory of molecular biology and joined up with Fred Sanger who was in urgent need of space; Hugh Huxley and Aaron Klug joined us; I officially became the director in 1979 before which Max Perutz was chairman; retired from the directorship at sixty and got my own small unit to return to science; on final retirement from the MRC managed to raise enough money to continue the lab for some time

19:54:22 Work on nematode worms; genes build the nervous system which then performs the behaviour; needed to determine the structure of the nervous system, it should be a small nervous system so could be finite and that we could make mutations and see how it altered behaviour; then we would hope to see what changes in the nervous system the mutations would produce and then would be able to map those onto the altered behaviour; that program has been partly carried out but effectively it involved doing the anatomy, the full embryology; big advantage of nematodes is according to the literature they had stereotype nervous system, constant number of cells and, it was thought, the same for every nematode of the same genetic composition; could ask under what conditions do you build a nervous system with the same genetic program; nematode ideal as easy to keep in the lab and easy for anyone to work on

29:48:12 Nobel prize awarded to me with John Sulston and Robert Horvitz; “don't worry” hypothesis described; the virtue of ignorance

38:20:05 Went to Singapore in 1984 and encouraged them to set up a graduate department of molecular biology; from 1999 a huge surge forward and I have been involved in setting up a gigantic operation there but have just retired; advice to a young scientist would be to go to a lab where there is a good mentor; big challenge that interests me is how to reconstruct the past from what we now know; science is a way of solving problems and for a young person, find a good problem and try to solve it though getting into the whole apparatus of science, which is difficult