And so I remember that a young man came up to me and said,
'Look, there is something interesting that Prof. Sinsheimer...' –
who was a colleague of mine at Caltech in the past,
and who was now in northern California as chairman of an institute, who was interested in DNA,
he had always worked in this field – and had organised a small meeting regarding this,
to see if it is possible to carry out this project. Therefore this reinforced my ideas,
at least someone agrees with me. And then,
when I repeated this in another meeting, I don't know where exactly,
in fact all this therefore aroused a little interest, but it was still very limited, so I said,
'Look, perhaps the most important thing is that I should write an article in "Science"',
which is the most popular science journal there is – 'to convey this point in such a way that,
after which, people could no longer ignore it, they have to understand whether or not they want to do this'.
And so I wrote this article that, from the start, was a bit too long, so Kennedy, who was director of "Science",
the editor said to me, 'No, this is too long, you need to shorten it'.
He said, 'From this issue we're starting a new section called "Perspectives", so write a perspective, two pages'.
This is what I did and it was published. It had a huge effect because, as I was saying,
when you publish something everyone can read it and everyone has to react in some way.
I remember that Paul Berg was at a meeting in Cold Spring Harbour,
I don't know, it was one of these meetings at Cold Spring Harbour.
He saw this article actually during the meeting,
then he spoke to Watson and said, 'Look, we will have to call a special meeting about this
with all the members already at the meeting'. And thus he started to discuss it
and this was in essence the start of the discussions on this subject. On the whole, reactions that I received
in the first two to three weeks were almost all negative, everyone saw the huge difficulty of doing this,
however, slowly, within less than a month, the situation changed completely,
because all those who at first hesitated, were against it, now saw the necessity
and this is how the project got off the ground so quickly, because...
[Q] However, I would say that the initial negative reactions, if within the space of a month...
the turmoil created by this "Science" article was what brought things out into the open.
Yes, certainly; there were meetings, incredible things were happening.
Because I remember there was a meeting there in Washington, at the Science Academy,
in which I again presented this, explaining the reasons, the advantages, etc., etc. and then a discussion,
wherein everyone presented positive sites, negative sides, etc. and there was a geneticist in the category,
who had a permanent position in the official hierarchy in Italy,
because he was a member of a committee of the Science Academy, and he said, 'But I don't understand
why you need to know all the genes, he said. 'It's like having a tree with lots of leaves and we want
to take all the leaves, one by one, to examine them. This is madness'. And I said,
'Think about it some more, the leaves of a tree are all the same, the genes of a man are all different'.
He didn't say anything else after this.
[Q] Is this geneticist still around?
Yes, yes, he's still around. And so the Genome Project took off.