In the 1970s, I did a Ph.D. with Fred Sanger in Cambridge who was in the process of inventing ways to map what's inside DNA. He later won the Nobel Prize.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
That work led to the emergence of the recombinant DNA technology thereby providing a major tool for analyzing mammalian gene structure and function and formed the basis for me receiving the 1980 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
When I began playing around at being a physical chemist, I enjoyed very much doing work on the structure of DNA molecules, something which I would never have dreamed of doing before I started.
In 1903, I finished my doctor's thesis and obtained the degree. At the end of the same year, the Nobel prize was awarded jointly to Becquerel, my husband and me for the discovery of radioactivity and new radioactive elements.
During this period, I became interested in how the new techniques of cloning and sequencing DNA could influence the study of genetics and I was an early and active proponent of the Human Genome Sequencing Project.
Fred Sanger was one of the most important scientists of the 20th century.
I have always been interested - indeed, waylaid - by the leading edges of technology, even during my Ph.D. years when I pioneered (but did not publish) agarose gel electrophoresis for RNA fractionation. Also, much later, I was instrumental in showing that Green Fluorescent Protein and RNAi could be made to work in mammalian cells.
He told me that Francis Crick and Jim Watson had solved the structure of DNA, so we decided to go across to Cambridge to see it. This was in April of 1953.
My first ideas of human in vitro fertilization (IVF) arose with my Ph.D. in Edinburgh University in the early 1950s. Supervised by Alan Beatty, my research was based on his work on altering chromosomal complements in mouse embryos.
Joseph Mandell and I began by attempting to make chromatography of DNA work.
I was first exposed to the idea of macro-molecular sequences while I was a postdoctoral fellow with Jack Strominger at Harvard. During that time, I briefly visited Fred Sanger's laboratory in Cambridge, England, to learn the methodology of RNA fingerprinting and sequencing.