![]() It was quite late in my career I was 29 at that time. I was then very lucky to go into molecular biology in Edinburgh when I joined Peter Walker's group in 1967. ![]() ![]() But it's a field that never went anywhere. Some of the discoveries I made then were, I think, really quite original. In that period, people wanted to find peaceful uses of atomic energy, and sterilization of food was one. In my earlier career, I was a radiation chemist, and I had some very nice experiments in looking at the effects of radiation on proteins, actually polyaminoacids, which I used as a model for proteins. A lot of people have lots of failures weekly and monthly! Gitschier: You are lucky if that's true, actually. Those are really hard to recall, exactly, because they happen all the time! There are things on a weekly or monthly basis that give you a big kick. When you are younger, you are probably more pleased by small results than when you get older. So from that way of looking at things, it's probably the earliest stuff that gave me the biggest kicks. It's not necessarily when you look back and say, “Well that was a fantastic thing!” It's the day-to-day things that happen when you are really doing the experiments and you see the results and you say, “Wow, that's a great result!” Southern: I think that for me the thrills are really what happens in the lab. Gitschier: When you look back over the course of your research career, what would be-for you-the highlights? ![]() Southern is soft-spoken, his voice low and gravelly, and I hung on every word. It was just as the reader might imagine: oak-paneled walls chock-a-block with portraits of former fellows, dons, and benefactors, upholstered chairs, rugs, and an attractive grandfather clock that allegedly chimes twice at 10 and, as we witnessed, 10 times at 11. We headed for the tower, then up a flight of stairs to a cozy room for coffee and discussion. We met at the Trinity Gate, where I was given shelter by the porter as Southern arrived under a large umbrella ( Image 1). I visited Southern in November during one of the wettest years in Oxford history, as this grey day sprinkled its contribution into the record books. This award led to his founding of a small company, Oxford Gene Technology (OGT), and through successful lawsuits to defend his patent from infringement, to licensing the patent as a source of funding for two highly successful philanthropic trusts: the Edina Trust, which supports science education in the United Kingdom, and the Kirkhouse Trust, which develops disease- and pest-resistant legume crops in Africa and India. In the late 1980s, while Professor of Biochemistry at Oxford, Southern conceived of oligonucleotide microarrays for DNA sequencing and was issued a patent for the invention. He was also a strong and productive proponent of physical mapping of the human genome as a complement to the genetic map. Working in Edinburgh in the Medical Research Council (MRC) Mammalian Genome unit, he was one of the first to sequence eukaryotic DNA and to appreciate the genetic architecture of satellite DNAs. It quickly became a mainstay for a generation of molecular biologists and spawned a template for mapping the human genome.īut the blot was no one-off for Southern, who is now entering his sixth decade at the bench. Devised in the mid-1970s, Southern's technique for transferring DNA from gels onto nitrocellulose paper allowed single-copy, eukaryotic genes to be discerned for the first time. In answer to your question, yes, this is an interview with the Southern, as in the eponymous blot.
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