Science and the World’s Future
University of Geneva
September 12, 2011
Bruce Alberts,
University of California, San Francisco (UCSF)
Editor-in-Chief, Science magazine
Talk Outline:
1. A little personal history
2. Some important policies for
strengthening science around the world
Crick
I was a high
school student,
when the
revolution in
biology began
with the Watson
and Crick
structure for
DNA in 1953
Watson was only
25 years old
Watson
Jim Watson today
As Jim Watson aged, dramatic progress was made in
our understanding of how chromosomes replicate
What are the proteins that catalyze the
reaction, and how do they copy the two
anti-parallel DNA stands in the DNA double
helix?
There were many puzzles to unravel and it
was great fun to try to solve them
1965 – 1966, a
wonderful year in
Geneva as a postdoctoral student
with Alfred Tissieres
and Dick Epstein
(Institut de Biologie
Moleculaire)
• Introduced to bacteriophage T4
• Developed DNA-cellulose affinity
chromatography
• Met Uli Laemmli (would soon
recruit him to Princeton)
Dick Epstein, July 2009
1966 - 1986, my lab worked with bacteriophage T4
A model organism for studying DNA replication
Discovery of the “protein machine” that makes a
new DNA helix by copying an old one, as
predicted by Watson and Crick
We now know that life is possible because
of the thousands of different types of
protein machines in each cell in our bodies,
each with a different function.
Most of them remain to be understood – we
know many of their components, but not how
they work.
Understanding each protein machine is one of
many great challenges for young scientists!
How does a protein machine work?
The magic of protein machines is best
appreciated by a movie that shows such a
machine in action – the protein machine that
replicates DNA.
The movie was made by Bruce Stillman at the Cold
Spring Harbor Laboratory, as part of the 50 year
DNA celebration there. It can be found on Cold
Spring Harbor DNA Learning Center website in the
section that deals with “Copying the code”.
Click here to see this video of DNA replication:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gL3aigv7w4A
The beauty of science
The world looks so different after learning science.
For example, trees are made of air, primarily. When they
are burned, they go back to air, and in the flaming heat is
released the flaming heat of the sun which was bound in to
convert the air into tree. And in the ash is the small
remnant of the part which did not come from air, that came
from the solid earth, instead.
These things are beautiful things, and the content of
science is wonderfully full of them. They are very
inspiring, and they can be used to inspire others.
Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize in physics