Encoding information, Sydney Brenner

Interviewee: Sydney Brenner. Sydney Brenner talks about the idea of applying a code to DNA sequence. (DNAi Location: Code > Reading the code > Players > Sydney Brenner > Code analogies)

So, many people have been interested in all of these ideas of codes and so on, and where did they all come from. Now I think a lot of the thinking about a code was conditioned on thinking about the Morse code, which those of us who had been Boy Scouts had to learn, you know, dot-dot-dot, dash-dash-dash, dot-dot-dot, SOS. So we thought of really a table and there'd be symbols on one side and they would stand for what I think was more, was a wider thing because that's just the table that, which you go from the elements of one language into the elements of, if you like, a dictionary. But the idea of encoding information, that I think had to come from the idea of computers.

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