SynBERC researcher Paul Rabinow interviews Dr. Sydney Brenner on November 13, 2008, at the Joint BioEnergy Institute in Emeryville, CA. Dr. Brenner addresses the need to reorganize education as the industry retracts and technology and science prevails (1:07), his thoughts on scientific work done for our nation’s offensive and/or defensive technology (7:30), how one might redesign academia to distribute power between physical and human scientists equitably (15:14), and on a different kind of scientific institution (23:05).

SynBERC proudly hosted a visit from Nobel laureate Dr. Sydney Brenner on November 13, 2008. Dr. Brenner has long been at the leading edge of molecular biology: Among his many notable discoveries are the existence of messenger RNA and, with Francis Crick in 1961, the triplet nature of the code of protein translation, which provided critical insights into the nature of the genetic code. Much of Brenner's early work was done in Caenorhabditis elegans, a 1 millimeter-long soil roundworm he chose mainly because it is simple, is easy to grow in bulk populations, and turned out be quite convenient for genetic analysis. The title of his Nobel lecture, "Nature's Gift to Science" is an homage to this modest nematode. His more recent work, involving new ways of analyzing gene sequences, has led to new insights into vertebrate evolution. Dr. Brenner is currently Senior Distinguished Fellow at the Salk Institute. In accepting the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, Dr. Brenner challenged scientists to develop the technology to make possible the detailed study of "natural human genetic variation."