Life's Greatest Secret (62 page)

Authors: Matthew Cobb

BOOK: Life's Greatest Secret

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19. Moscow Biochemistry Congress 1961: Commemorative stamp and photo showing Crick (left) and Benzer (to his right), with Jacob (second from right). All five men are wearing Congress badges.

20. Crick’s annotations to the programme for the Moscow Biochemical Congress session he chaired on 15 August 1961, showing his handwritten inclusion of Nirenberg during the 10:00 Discussion period. This gem was discovered by Bob Goldstein.

21. François Jacob and his wife, Lise, on the beach at La Tranche-sur-Mer, on the west coast of France, August 1962.

22. Jacques Monod (left) and Sydney Brenner in the 1960s.

23. François Jacob (left) and Jacques Monod in the laboratory in the early 1970s. Monod died of leukemia in 1976.

24. Francis Crick speaking at the 1963 Cold Spring Harbor Symposium. On the blackboard is a diagram of the central dogma.

25. Francis Crick (lying down with back to camera) hosts a ‘flower party’ at his house in Cambridge, in the mid-1960s. The house was named The Golden Helix. According to Henry Selby-Lowndes, the son of the photographer, Guy Selby-Lowndes, the music included hits by Herman’s Hermits and Herb Alpert.

26. Jacques Monod (left) and Leo Szilárd discuss the operon, Cold Spring Harbor, 1961. Monod described Szilárd as looking ‘like a petty Italian fruit-merchant’.

27. Francis Crick (left) and Seymour Benzer at a Symposium on Nucleic Acids held in Hyderabad, India, in January 1964.

28. Exchange of letters between Seymour Benzer and François Jacob, André Lwoff and Jacques Monod, on the occasion of the French trio being awarded the Nobel Prize, in 1965. Benzer was renowned for his sense of humour.

29. Banner put up in Marshall Nirenberg’s laboratory at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, when news came through of his 1969 Nobel Prize.

30. Asilomar conference on recombinant DNA, 1975. Left to right: Maxine Singer, Norton Zinder, Sydney Brenner and Paul Berg. The possibility of using CRISPR to change the human germ line has recently led to calls for a ‘new Asilomar’ to debate the ethical and technical questions involved.

NOTES

Chapter 1

. Wood and Orel (2001), p. 258; see also Cobb (2006a), Poczai

et al.

(2014).

. López-Beltrán (1994), Müller-Wille and Rheinberger (2007, 2012).