People of Science with Brian Cox - Dame Ottoline Leyser on Barbara McClintock
Transcript
- Brian: So could you describe who you are and what you do.
- Yes. My name's Ottoline Leyser
- and I'm a Plant Developmental Geneticist.
- I work in a research institute in Cambridge
- it's called The Sainsbury Laboratory
- and the goal of our institute is to try
- to understand how plants control their
- growth and development.
- Brian: Who have you chosen as your person of science.
- Ottoline: So my person of science is Barbara McClintock.
- Brian: Now her work is clearly important.
- I mean she got the Nobel Prize in 1983
- but could you outline how important it is in your area of study?
- Ottoline: There are two major discoveries that she made.
- One of them was to provide definitive proof
- that genes were on chromosomes.
- Brian: So genes are an abstract idea.
- So we say that you know blue eyes and brown eyes
- and those characteristics.
- Ottoline: That word was coined as, absolutely, an abstract idea
- to describe a hereditary unit,
- some kind of thing that passed from generation to generation.
- But what is it gene physically?
- And the chromosome theory was the sort of beginnings
- of trying to understand what a gene was
- and what came out of that was that genes
- were somehow,
- somehow on or part of these chromosomes.
- And then what Barbara did was really provide direct
- evidence that that was the case.
- Brian: I find it just baffling actually because you are talking
- about someone looking physically down a microscope
- and physically seeing things move around and saying
- that correlates with this property.
- And why did she work with maize, that's corn?
- Ottoline: It's a beautiful genetic system,
- the genetics you can do it in maize is very powerful.
- From her point of view it's partly
- because the chromosomes are big and so you can see them more
- easily down a regular microscope.
- Brian: She was obviously very eminent early on and then makes
- this what turned out to be a radical breakthrough.
- Ottoline: She developed over a number of years a substantial body
- of evidence that showed that genes could move
- that they can jump about the genome.
- And in moving around they quite often cause
- the chromosomes to break.
- So she developed this concept of 'jumping genes'
- or 'transposable elements'
- and has certainly changed the way we think about genomes.
- Brian: And we have a flower here which is an example
- of that process in action.
- So how are we to understand those colours in the context
- of Barbara McClintock’s work?
- Ottoline: So these roses are a very beautiful and graphic
- illustration of this idea of 'jumping genes'.
- So the reason that they have two colours
- is because in the cells of these petals there
- is a gene that allows the cells to make the red pigment.
- And if there's a 'jumping gene', these transposons
- stuck in that gene it doesn't work. So you get white.
- Brian: So this transposon that’s just genetic material that’s got
- in there randomly essentially in the sequence
- and it just breaks it, doesn't work.
- Ottoline: When it jumps out then you can stick the gene back
- together again and that restores the red function and so you get
- patches of red.
- Brian: The research was not taken seriously at first
- was it because it was considered so radical.
- Ottoline: It took a while.
- The ideas she was proposing was so radical
- the broader implications across biology
- for that did indeed take quite a long time to find its place.
- Brian: So in a sense what had to happen was that the consensus
- or I suppose just knowledge in a way had to catch up
- with the research that she'd done.
- And so she withdrew didn't she, to some extent?
- Ottoline: Yes absolutely.
- I think she felt people weren't getting it.
- So why should she keep talking about it?
- But eventually she did indeed get the recognition
- she deserved in the form of the Nobel Prize
- for Medicine and Physiology as the sole winner.
- Brian: It is rare isn't it for just one person to get the Nobel Prize.
- She is essentially laying the foundations for a whole field.
- The field. It's a remarkable thing.
- Ottoline: And it was a really radical idea.
- She decided that the way it works is very, very different
- from the way other people were thinking
- so she definitely had to take a big
- kind of step into the unknown.
- I think it is indicative of her determination
- just to do the good work and find out what was going on
- rather than to worry about what other people thought about it.
- And I think that's another reason why I find her inspiring.
Ottoline Leyser talks to Brian Cox about her admiration for Nobel Prize winning geneticist, Barbara McClintock and explains the two great principles she uncovered.
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