At the double

school. Had the five years in Rio been a brake on his education? “On the contrary,” he says. “I was challenged by having to continue my studies while also learning the language.” It hardly held him back. After earning degrees in medicine and biochemistry at Zurich, he went to the US in 1961. At New York University, he studied RNA phage replication, focusing on the RNA bacteriophage Qβ, which has only 4,300 nucleotides. (He remarks wryly that much of the molecular biology of Qβ remains unknown, and wonders aloud how some researchers can talk seriously about understanding 100,000 human genes.) By 1967 he was back in Zurich, heading the institute, and in 1978 he and other leading molecular biologists founded the company Biogen. As he was already working in the institute on the cloning of mouse interferon, his group was commissioned by Biogen to clone human interferon cDNA. Success came unexpectedly over Christmas 1979; Weissmann, who had left the lab for a few days’ skiing with the family, recounts how he heard the news in a call-box on top of a mountain, before rushing back to spend the rest of the holiday in the lab. Although his time with Biogen was enjoyable, 10 years were enough and from the late 1980s he was ready to concentrate again on basic research. In fact, Weissmann not only enjoys basic research but also feels passionate about defending it. “One should cultivate basic research as one cultivates the arts,” he says — and, as a fan of twentieth-century art and of the work of members of the London School, such as Francis Bacon, he is better placed than many colleagues to know what this means. And his next project? Well, he gives himself about five years in London, then he will return to Switzerland. “I think that would be a good time to stop.” But will he?