Sydney Brenner's Loose Ends and False Starts

I need not have worried. As Sydney himself put it in the introduction to Loose Ends, a collection of his best columns from the first three years published in book form: “[Peter] accepted no excuses about being late for deadlines and I am pleased to say I managed to meet all of these, if only by microseconds in some cases”. Whether microseconds, hours or, occasionally, a couple of days before the deadline, the fax would whirr and out would spew a couple of handwritten sheets of prose, as like as not on hotel paper from Singapore or Kyoto. There were very few crossings out, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there had been no drafts. Sometimes the fax would be imperfect, but it was almost always possible to fill in the missing or illegible words. My job was, as Sydney puts it, that of “removing cumbersome phrases and watching for any words that might invoke suits of libel and defamation”. On the whole there was little editing to do – Sydney wrote exceptionally well for a scientist and to length, plus or minus a line or two. Now and then the red pen had to be used somewhat liberally, not to remove defamatory phrases (it was much more fun to leave them in) but to add an explanatory phrase, avoid repetition or re-order the text. Only once did I, with some trepidation, reject a column outright: Sydney didn’t complain and immediately wrote a replacement. Without a doubt, the most popular of his columns comprised the letters that ‘Uncle Syd’ wrote to ‘Dear Willie’, offering advice to Willie as he climbed the ladder from Graduate Student to Retired Professor (the step before Expired Professor, Sydney would say) – the last letter being penned from Schloss Alzheimer. As this series of columns became famous worldwide, Sydney would half complain that he was now introduced as ‘Uncle Syd’ when giving a lecture and that he was better known to the younger generation for his columns than for his science. Whereas this would be utterly unjust, I am proud to have been the midwife to Sydney’s seven-year stint as a columnist and to what must rank as some of the finest and wittiest popular writing by a scientist in the 20th century.