Demons to Champions - How I fell in love with my neurodivergent maverick mind - Chapter 16

When a letter is enough

If you want to read the Introduction and Chapter 1 go here -

If you want to read Chapter 14 go here -

When a letter is enough

I’m prone to trusting people before I should, assuming the best of them. Excited and distracted by new opportunitiesand ideas, I fall in love with the possibilities. Dreaming of what might be, disappointed when my trust proves misplaced. Once upon a time I’d blame them, not me. In 1991 I led a small research team at Charing Cross & Westminster Medical School. We were in the vanguard of an international effort to develop an innovative laboratory technique called in situ hybridisation.

Here’s some science, but I’ll keep it to a need-to-know basis.

Dr. Rosalind Franklin used X-Ray crystallography in the early 1950s to visualize DNA’s chemical structure. Watson and Crick received the Nobel Prize for re-interpreting Franklin’s data to infer DNA’s double- helical structure. For fifty years, the study of DNA and its chemical partner RNA was restricted to test tubes. Until the late 1980s, no one had been able to pinpoint the location of specific DNA or RNA mole- cules within tissues or cells.

DNA is important because it’s the chemical library of life. Situated within the nucleus of a cell it holds the chemical codes for all our genes. A cypher passed from cell to cell, generation to generation. Like a book, the code within DNA is transcribed into RNA which in turn is trans- lated into strings of specific amino acids making up the proteinsthat are building blocks of cells, tissues, and organisms.

I wanted to achieve several things: to label a cell carrying a specific normal gene or a mutant version causing disease; to localise active genes in cells and label transcribed RNA; finally, to pinpoint RNA and its translated proteinin the same cells. In 1990 almost none of this was possible. It was an exciting time to be a scientist. I felt like I was on the edge of something ground-breaking. So much for science, what about technology?