Relationship between creatures, John Sulston
Interviewee: John Sulston. Nobel Laureate John Sulston speaks about the relationships between organisms, and why one organism can be a good model for another. (DNAi Location: Manipulation > Techniques > Model organisms > Interviews > Relationships between creatures)
The key thing to have in mind is the unity of life, if every life form were specially created as, as some believe, and they have no particular relationship to each other, then of course there wouldn't really be much value in studying more than the one you're actually interested in. But the truth is, that life is very, very unified and it's unified, all the indications are because of the evolutionary process, that it all goes back to a common ancestor four billion years ago. And it turns out that an awful lot of life processes have been conserved, so you can look in bacteria and find that half the genes have clear counterparts in the human being. You can look in the nematode, of its twenty thousand genes, half of them have clear counterparts in the human being, and all the way up it's the same. Nature is not reinventing, it's actually reusing and it does more than that, it reuses whole pieces of mechanism.
john sulston,laureate john,nobel laureate,model organisms,manipulation techniques,common ancestor,dnai,life processes,interviewee,nematode,counterparts,organism,genes,bacteria,creatures,unity,evolution,relationships,relationship,truth
- ID: 15173
- Source: DNALC.DNAi
- Download: Theora Video MPEG 4 Video
Related Content
15171. Reading our own code, John Sulston
Nobel Laureate John Sulston reflects on the Human Genome Project from an evolutionary perspective.
15281. A good organism to use for genetic research, Sydney Brenner
Nobel Laureate Sydney Brenner talks about the reasons why C. elegans, a nematode worm, is a useful organism to study.
15169. The public sequencing process, John Sulston
Nobel Laureate John Sulston, a key figure in the UK sequencing effort, talks about breaking DNA apart so that the sequence can be reassembled.
15172. The human sequencing project
Nobel Laureate John Sulston, former director of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, talks about the competition within the public sequencing effort, and the distraction of the private.
15645. David Botstein, Mario Capecchi, John Sulston, Ewan Birney, Sydney Brenner
Model organisms researchers: (clockwise from top left) David Botstein, Mario Capecchi, John Sulston, Ewan Birney, and Sydney Brenner.
548. Model Center
Model organisms share with humans many key biochemical and physiological functions that have been conserved (maintained) by evolution.
555. Model Organisms
A human is a complicated organism, and it is considered unethical to do many kinds of experiments on human subjects. For these reasons, biologists often use simpler “model” organisms that are easy to keep and manipulate in the laboratory.
15425. First reactions to the Human Genome Project, James Watson
Nobel Laureate James Watson, the first director of the Human Genome Project, talks about his first reaction to the idea.
15170. Genome sequencing: missing a stage, John Sulston
John Sulston, a key figure in the public genome project, speaks about the difficulties posed by missing a step in the sequencing process.
1361. Model Organisms (Lesson)
Students work through a series of experiments that investigate the use of model organisms in the search for a better understanding of the genes that influence memory formation.