I remember reading a 'Scientific American' article about the use of new physical techniques - including neutron scattering - as a method for unravelling the structure of the ribosome. I was fascinated.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I began studying ribosomes as a postdoctoral fellow in Peter Moore's laboratory in 1978.
I started working on ribosomes when I was a post doc, in 1978, when it would have been impossible, really, to solve it. But, it was just a fundamental problem in biology.
This discovery convinced me of the power of crystallography and led me to continue in this field.
The success in the determination of the high-resolution structures of ribosomal subunits and eventually the whole ribosome was the culmination of decades of effort.
I knew the ribosome was going to be the focus of Nobel prizes. It stands at the crossroads of biology, between the gene and what comes out of the gene. But I had convinced myself I was not going to be a winner.
I did a thesis in experimental nuclear physics under the direction of Samuel K. Allison.
Investigating the forces that hold the nuclear particles together was a long task.
It was Max Perutz who inspired me to go into structural biology when he gave a lecture at Harvard in 1963. As soon as I heard him talk, I decided that this is what I want to do.
In this atmosphere I soon became interested in nucleic acids.
I became fascinated by the then-blossoming science of molecular biology when, in my senior year, I happened to read the papers by Francois Jacob and Jacques Monod on the operon theory.
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