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The beginning of my interest in biochemistry

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Seymour Papert
Sydney Brenner Scientist
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Now a very important person in my South African life is someone- that is Seymour Papert. Seymour was someone about my age, contemporary of mine, and Seymour was a brilliant, is still a brilliant mathematician and in fact, much later in the course, he was also very interested in politics and philosophy and it was much later, while I was a medical student, that I got to know him very well and in fact, he taught me mathematics and I taught him physiology. Thank God it wasn't the other way around. And he is someone who I think got me interested in the whole idea of mathematical theories and ultimately in computers and things like this because he went off to MIT where he worked with Marvin Minsky on the whole field of Artificial Intelligence and so on. So he was a very good friend and a very important one and also, because of the fringe left-wing politics that we were associated together.

South African Sydney Brenner (1927-2019) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2002. His joint discovery of messenger RNA, and, in more recent years, his development of gene cloning, sequencing and manipulation techniques along with his work for the Human Genome Project have led to his standing as a pioneer in the field of genetics and molecular biology.

Listeners: Lewis Wolpert

Lewis Wolpert is Professor of Biology as Applied to Medicine in the Department of Anatomy and Developmental Biology of University College, London. His research interests are in the mechanisms involved in the development of the embryo. He was originally trained as a civil engineer in South Africa but changed to research in cell biology at King's College, London in 1955. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1980 and awarded the CBE in 1990. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1999. He has presented science on both radio and TV and for five years was Chairman of the Committee for the Public Understanding of Science.

 

 


Listen to Lewis Wolpert at Web of Stories

 

 

Tags: Seymour Papert, Marvin Minsky

Duration: 1 minute, 26 seconds

Date story recorded: April-May 1994

Date story went live: 24 January 2008