A Conversation with John Sulston

Sir John Sulston was a co-winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2002. He won the prize for his discoveries concerning “genetic regulation of organ development and programmed cell death,” along with his colleagues sydney Brenner and H. Robert Horvitz. Dr. Sulston was founding director of the Sanger Centre, Cambridge, England, which he headed from 1992 to 2000. From 1993 to 2000, he led the British arm of the international team selected to work on the Human Genome Project. He is co-author of the book The Common Thread: A Story of Science, Politics, Ethics, and the Human Genome, published by Joseph Henry Press in 2002. This interview was conducted on December 20, 2002, shortly after Dr. Sulston was awarded his Nobel Prize and was originally broadcast on that date on radio station WPKN-FM in Bridgeport, Connecticut. The interview was conducted by Valerie Richardson, the Managing Editor of The Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine. Dr. Sulston has been an outspoken advocate against letting the data from the Human Genome Project become property of commercial interests that would charge the world's scientific community for its use. Since leaving the Sanger Institute, he has worked with OxFam, the Oxford Campaign for Famine Relief.