Well, there were several things. Number one, Watson and Dulbecco particularly - Renato Dulbecco
felt that this was really the key for us to get into the prevention, as did Lou Thomas at that time.
They were - Thomas was talking about the problem we were having with halfway technology
and how much that was going to cost, and the three of them felt that if we could get into
the GenBank and other things like that even though that wasn't articulated at that time, that we could
make some substantial progress in finding the cure and prevention of disease rather than just
treating the symptoms. But they knew in some way that this had to happen. They had to get
beyond just looking for the switch of what turned cells on and off.
Well, I was basically there, but what they thought it would be - I would gather if you talked to
all of them they would say that this has gone far beyond. There's far more opportunities.
The actual sequencing has lead us into new directions. It's focused our ability to find things more.
It's changing research from a lot of wet labs to some other sequences particularly.
Somebody said databases were the forefront of biomedical research,
and that's becoming, I think, more and more true as I listen today.
Oh, not at all. Not at all. In fact, to tell you the truth, I didn't hear much about computers
except for one or two people back in those days. They were more on what was going to be available
and not how they could possibly handle that, and I think they first realized the value of computers
when Landsat went up in about 1967. Fortunately, it indiscernible in four days, I think.
And they're still working on the data that's transmitted back here, because we didn't have
the computers in those times to do the details.
Some did. Watson and Wyngaarden right from the get-go
felt this was going to be international and it was going to become something that could really
bring more and more scientists throughout the world into collaborations together.
Those two, I remember specifically. Delbecco did too, to a degree, and Thomas was one who felt
that there had to be a new direction in getting more and more international research going.
Well, remember you're asking a journalist a scientific question, so I have no basis for any
authority here, but I think - you know, from what I've looked at and what I listened to today,
I don't think we have near begun to get even close to where we want to be and where we want to go.
You know, we're talking now pretty seriously about your - well, my grandkids and your
grandkids living to be over the century mark, and maybe as much as 150 years old. That to me
is not as far out as it seems, because we have learned so very, very much in the past - well, I've
been dealing with this for 40 years, and where I started, the big question was how do you turn
on and off a cell to stop cancer. And we've progressed so far beyond that that it's beyond the
things that Maynard Olsen thought about, that Judson wrote about, it's just gone far beyond
that kind of information, and with faster computers, with better utilization of computers,
with bringing more scientists into - for example, computational biologists will get this discipline
going a lot more. It offers great opportunity. I don't think we're anywhere near close to that.
This was interesting because what we've just heard this morning, particularly with the historian,
because it presented different pieces of this. I was, for example, in a piece of this with a group of
eminent scientists, and I was not aware of everything else that was going on, nor was I aware of
some of the thoughts that were happening in the background, and I'm sure they would tell you
that they didn't really know that we were there either. We were all coming at it kind of pushing
this one idea, because it was believed by most people to be the real frontier, the endless frontier of science.
To some degree, I certainly was. I was coordinator of something called the Delegation for Basic Biomedical Research,
and this was a group of Nobel laureates that was headed up at various times by Watson, Varmus,
and others, and at that particular point, their view was how do you get support for this.
And the big move was because they were waiting on each other. I mean, the Department of Energy
was doing certain things. I understood it to be because everybody felt this was important to understand
what radiation did to human subjects. This was where this was really important, and yet I was
very well aware that Watson and others felt that biomedical research had to go broader on this.
We had to really learn. So they were sort of all pushing in the same direction, and the energy people
were pushing more in the public hearing kind of thing, and the delegation was pushing harder to
get appropriations, and then the decision came - how do you deal with science? How do you deal with this?
Is this NIH? And there were some arguments going on here, but Wyngaarden and Watson came
to sort of a meeting of the minds, where Watson said I've got to decide what I'm going to do for
my own conscience. I either have to go to Energy - but if you tell me that NIH is going to move forward,
I'll put my support behind that. And this was a meeting between Wyngaarden and Watson that I
happened to be at. And that was the beginning. And Wyngaarden took the lead here.
He went out - that was sort of a heroic move for him to take that kind of initiative and move it.
And that was the key, but the other person that was mentioned today who really put a lot of effort
in it was Elke Jordan, who eventually became Watson's deputy, but she had a very fine view
of what was going to happen if they could just get it into operation. So there were a lot of people pushing.
Some of them pushing against each other. Some of them pushing but not even realizing others were there.
It was a very fascinating time, and of course at the same time they begin to do some sequencing,
And that got to be exciting, and then the whole question of do you patent life or don't you.