Transcript from an interview with the 2007 Nobel Laureates in Physiology or Medicine Mario R. Capecchi, Sir Martin J. Evans and Oliver Smithies, 6 December 2007. The interviewer is Adam Smith, Editor-in-Chief of Nobelprize.org.

Oliver Smithies, Mario Capecchi, Martin Evans, co-recipients of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Welcome to this interview with Nobelprize.org. It’s been a couple of months since the announcements. How have those two months been?

Martin Evans: They have been very hectic. There’s a complete media storm and of course a lot of delight of our colleagues. It’s an impossible to walk through the university without conversations all the way, so it’s been fairly hectic for us.

Mario Capecchi: I think both hectic and also exciting, because I think it’s an honour for the lab. It’s been a whirlwind, more interviews than I’ve ever had in my whole life or ever hope to have in my whole life. So no, it’s been a real pleasure.

Oliver Smithies: I think I’ve been rather wicked. I’ve let my secretary and my colleague and the help of my wife look after all of the details and I’ve gone on with ordinary life most of the time. I finished writing a grand re-submission I might say, which meant it failed before, and writing the talk. But I also had a joyful time with the foundation where they rented an airplane and we took air to air shots of me flying my motor glider. I still haven’t seen those, I’m looking forward to it.

Oh really, so there’s been time for flying in between the tour.

Oliver Smithies: Yes, there’ve been times for flying and there’ve been times for interviews.

You were awarded the prize for your discoveries in the late 1980s which collectively led to the creation of, amongst other things, the knockout mouse which is of course a universally used tool for the study of mammalian genetics, and I’d like to turn to that a little later. But could we start by looking at your scientific beginnings. I’d be interested to know what it was that led you to become a scientist. Perhaps we’ll start at the other end this time.

Oliver Smithies: I’ve always thought it was because I wanted to be an inventor when as a child of probably six years old, seven years old, something like that, reading about a comic strip about this person who was an inventor. I thought I would like to be an inventor, and in a way that’s what a scientist is. I didn’t know the word scientist so I wanted to be an inventor and somehow that’s the way it’s gone.

The word inventor conjures up the vision of somebody tinkering around in the lab and that’s very much you, is it?

Oliver Smithies: I didn’t know about labs at all. But I knew about tinkering, tinkering and making things and I’ve made things all my life so that’s been part of what science is about for me. Making new things and making them work and then finding new things out with the things that you made.

It sounds like you knew your path from very early, but was there a crystallising moment when you …

Oliver Smithies: No, I think it’s been just one continuous stream I’ve known since forever as it were. I did think at one time, I won my scholarship to Oxford in physics really and I thought about being a physicist and debated and then decided to do medicine instead but didn’t complete that. I’m a med school dropout and went into physiology and then chemistry and my current career. That was when I realised I was to do more research with that track than I would otherwise have been able to do.

Professor Capecchi?

Mario Capecchi: I think it had two beginnings. One is I was raised in a home that had science. My uncle was a scientist, physicist, so I was steeped in science at the very beginning. I went to a school, a Quaker school where I was more interested in other topics and then in college then I started back in science, in particular in physics and chemistry. I think the experience there was really what gelled it because it was a university where you studied one quarter and then you worked a quarter and then you studied a quarter and the jobs were all over the country and they start out fairly general and then you start going more into jobs that you’re interested in. Once I started going into science then I had lab jobs and worked with MIT, Kettering Foundation and so on. I got a lot of experience fairly early in my career.

That sounds a fairly conventional path but of course early on, you had a very unconventional childhood, and for those of you who don’t know about it, could I ask you to speak about that a little?

Mario Capecchi: I was born in Italy, in Verona, and my mother was a poet. She was a lecturer at the Sorbonne and also actually got a degree there. There she joined a group called The Bohemians which were a set of poets who very politically minded and thought they could strike down essentially nazism and fascism with a pen. At that point she moved with another friend who was also a poet to Southern Tirol, just north of Bolzano in Italy, and that’s where I was born. At that point she, because of her political meanings, knew that eventually she would be picked up and they were tracking her from Germany from quite a period of time. Then in 1941, they actually did come and pick her up and she was interned in Germany and then at that point it was better for me not to be with her, so she arranged for me to be on a farm family. I was there for a year and somehow the funds essentially disappeared so then I went on the road and trekked through Northern Italy.

This is as a child of seven or eight?

Mario Capecchi: No, this is much earlier than that. This is at the age of four and a half. After the war, she actually survived and she came looking for me and so she found me about a year and a half later. At that time I was in Reggio Emilia in a hospital.

It beggars belief how she would ever actually find you. Amazing.

Mario Capecchi: I think she was tracking hospitals throughout the … Also she knew where I started and then backtracked essentially until she found me.

That is a very unusual beginning.

Mario Capecchi: It is. I think a lot of it entailed just luck. I think the people that were unlucky or not talking to them, so a selected group essentially that survived.

Thank you.

Martin Evans: My story is probably much less interesting. It’s a difficult question, when did I first become a scientist? I think probably I always have been a scientist. My earliest recollections are of the same sort of interest in things and how things work and one could take things apart and put them together again. Very much interested in biology and flowers and animals and things of this sort and really, I don’t think I’ve ever not been a scientist. Whether it’s something you’re born with or whether it’s something you’re fortunate enough to have intelligent parents who bring you up with – I don’t know.

I suppose it raises the question of whether you’ve… You’re all really saying that you’ve been scientists from the beginning with perhaps a slightly slower beginning in Professor Capecchi’s case. It raises the question of whether when you look at students, you expect them to also have been scientists from the beginning or whether you think that it’s possible to become one later.

Martin Evans: Oh, it certainly is possible, I don’t know what your experiences are, but I’ve had some quite late starters who’ve done very well.

Right.

Oliver Smithies: I think you know, I’ve thought about this a little recently and that just as, say a famous cellist, or a distinguished cellist can recognise a student much earlier than maybe even the student knows, that this person is going to make a world leader in cello, a cello player for example, and can tell that. Maybe scientists can do that too in a way, and they recognise this ability before the person maybe even knows they have it. So, it’s something recognisable in the sort of semi subconscious way, a characteristic. My wife and I often talk about it, about our various people who have worked or are working with us and whether they have what we call the fire. The fire is you can’t bear not to know or to find out. They come, they’re the ones who come back at the weekend, and they’re always there. They’re always asking the question, and they can’t bear not to know the answer. They are the scientists of the next generation who will make the big discoveries, and it’s a recognisable feature, I think. But it’s the same, I think it’s the same in all of the disciplines, it may be music as well, literature probably, it’s not really different. Different characteristics are recognised in different ways by the different disciplines.

Martin Evans: I tend to very much appreciate individuality and thought in students and enterprise. People who come and do things differently and will argue with me about it. What I find is very worrying is that many students of the undergraduate level, they come in and they say, What do we need to know? And I say, Well, you need to understand the subject and they are always very dissatisfied with that answer.

They just want the answers to pass the exam?

Martin Evans: Yes. No, you don’t need to know anything, you need to understand it.

It sounds as if you as scientists are able to identify these people, perhaps before they’ve identified themselves there’s a very strong role for you in nurturing those talents.

Martin Evans: We do try to, yes.

Mario Capecchi: I would guess that everybody has at least that one teacher essentially that made a difference. Again, I think what we’re looking for is passion. I think you have to have abilities, but I think if you don’t have the passion or the abilities don’t make any difference. If you have it inside you, and I think that’s something, I’m not sure where that comes from. I think that’s something that’s either is nurtured or you’re born with, I’m not sure.

That leads me nicely to the next question I was going to ask which is whether you have benefited from one particular person who has mentored you. Perhaps we could start with you Professor Capecchi?

Mario Capecchi: Yes, I think particularly my uncle for example. I think he was an example both as a human being as well as a scientist. He was a very gifted scientist. Then I’ve had teachers along the way. We all have good teachers and bad teachers but I think what we remember are the good ones, and those are the ones that actually make a difference. All of us I think, we’re always building on other people, we’re not in isolation, so we are dependent on our previous histories and who has influenced us.

You worked with Jim Watson for quite a time, was he a good mentor?

Mario Capecchi: He was a fantastic mentor. I think you know, certainly he has the passion, he’s extremely gifted and he also read enormously. Just because he could read a book by just taking the page and doing this and comprehending it. He also travelled a lot so he knew. At that time the community was fairly small, right now it’s impossible to keep abreast of everything that’s going on, even in our own field, little known in other fields, whereas at that time you knew everybody, and you knew where things were going and that was on a world basis, not just United States. Having that influence, was always an enormous benefit. He had a very deep influence on me.

Oliver Smithies: I could identify teachers at almost every stage of my life. Before I was eleven I went to a little village school and some teachers were very poor. I remember one teacher – I even remember his name – Nethergate. I don’t remember what he looked like, but he was a marvellous teacher and inspiring. Then when I went to a grammar school, in England, Heath Grammar School – a very old school founded in 1597, so it’s quite an old school – and there many of the teachers were inspiring. I was very fortunate in having fine teachers and then going to the university it was the same although there I think I would pick out my mentor who taught me as a tutor when I was an undergraduate, a little, Sandy Ogston, and later was my adviser when I went on to do chemistry and a research degree, a PhD /- – -/ in Oxford and became a great friend too. He was very inspiring.

You were saying you’re his second laureate production?

Oliver Smithies: Yes, I’m his second Nobel Laureate, and my college is proud of having two Nobel Prizes. The college is in Oxford, of course there are many colleges and many people don’t know, that but there are. Some of them are quite small and so Sandy had two. Then I had another teacher, very important, I mentioned in my thank you speech for all of us. I’m going to thank teachers so it’s rather fortunate you asked the question and I’m going to thank also my flight instructor, Thebe Mori, who taught me to fly after I was 50 and that’s really quite difficult to teach a person to fly when they’re so ancient. But he taught me something else. He taught me to overcome fear with knowledge and that applies to science as well. Scientists are often nervous to try a new field or try an experiment. Sometimes they’re even frightened to try their own experiment because it might fail, and they put it off and put it on. But that fear can be overcome with knowledge also and I think that’s an important lesson I learnt from him. I taught flying as well and I tried to teach my students that. I’ve seen a fear be overcome by knowledge, many times.

Martin Evans: There’s a great answers, and I think contain a lot of general truth. I don’t think that I had any really important mentors post graduate. But I certainly remember some very good school teachers I had, right back at the primary level. It would be invidious to pick individuals out, there were some also some very bad ones as well. But yes, I had a very good schooling. I then went on to Cambridge University and there were superb lecturers there. I did eventually a finals course in biochemistry which was still at that time, a superbly taught course by the top people in the field, and that puts you in enormously good stead.

It’s a basic education.

Martin Evans: Yes.

So, I wanted to ask what it is about science that gives you the greatest pleasure? I’m not sure people often think of it as pleasure of doing science, but obviously it does give you pleasure so …

Martin Evans: I think my greatest pleasure is my things I do with my own hands. I enjoy the actual process, the wet laboratory and the tissue touch process. Some of my colleagues have referred to this pejoratively as saying well I’m a horticulturalist really. But I do enjoy the practical and doing it myself.

Because so many people step away from the bench.

Martin Evans: That’s a great disadvantage. As you get more senior, you get more administrative jobs and so on. You get more people you’ve got to look after, a lot of things coming in, both from the university and nationally and internationally. And it does take you away from the bench and that is unfortunate and it takes me away from my first love of science, certainly.

Oliver Smithies: I would agree very much with what Martin says that the actual doing is for me the greatest pleasure of it, and the excitement. Especially of some of the experiments which I’ve had part in are often quite short, as well as having long term things. So next morning you come and you see your result and oh, it’s not what you wanted. But it’s exciting anyway. Now I know what I have to do to make it work and every day you’re going to make it work. It doesn’t work very often but you always think it’s going to work. It’s the day-to-day excitement of it and I’m fortunate. Perhaps I’m rather selfish because I still do work at the bench and all my time is at the bench, but I’ve never been a chairman of anything or anything of that sort. I’ve had lots of opportunities and I feel that’s rather selfish not to do that because the chairman and our administrators, they help many people whereas it’s a little selfish to continue to work at the bench and I hope people forgive me for it as it were.

Martin Evans: If I could add to that, when I went to Cardiff University, I actually gave up a lot of my bench time to take on a major administrative role, running a large school. That does, I mean it’s not the science, but you do get the same sort of feedback benefit from seeing the benefits you’re providing for other people. And I have to remind myself, that’s science as well, because they’re doing the science. But actually the personal interactions are also very rewarding.

Yes of course.

Mario Capecchi: I think the most exciting aspect of science is when all of a sudden you do see something new, that hasn’t been before. I think that’s an inhalation, that’s very difficult to describe. It’s amazing, all of a sudden it crystallises, and you see it, it’s right there and it’s sometimes something that you anticipated and sometimes it’s something that you didn’t anticipate. Either way I think it’s a tremendous assign. I think in a sense I view my life as that we’re always playing, somebody else pays for it and we’re given the opportunities. We have a bunch of puzzles and we’re putting them together in different ways and then all of a sudden you see the picture. It’s tremendous high.

But you must enjoy the playing because presumably the new insights …

Mario Capecchi: The playing is ,,, I think that’s every day. You don’t have insights, you don’t every day unfortunately, I wish I did. The playing has does give you a pleasure in a sense of just the manipulation that you’re using your hands and trying to figure out, one of the good controls and I think that aspect is continuous and that’s pleasurable. But the other is a high. So it’s a very different experience.

Oliver Smithies: In that respect there’s, what Mario said, I think needs emphasis to people who are thinking about science and entering science that it’s very important to find – if you want to become a scientist – a part of science where you like doing what you’re doing. You like the everyday thing. You don’t have to depend upon a successful and some large problem to get your enjoyment. You have to do, enjoy what you do every day. I’d like to make the distinction between, not every day, but every day. Your every day work you have to enjoy, and I advise young scientists, if they don’t like what they’re doing, change because they aren’t doing the right thing. If they don’t enjoy it, then they should find something else. Because then if you enjoy it you have a chance of success, but if you don’t enjoy it, it’s not much chance of it working and you have to work hard. There’s no substitute for working hard. I don’t care how gifted a person is. Those who don’t work hard don’t do well.

Martin Evans: I think Mario said something really quite stimulating and interesting. He mentioned controls and I think one of the very rewarding features is thinking through problems and realising that there is a way of controlling something so you can get an answer out. And then possibly going back to the lab and trying to do it. Of course that’s very important, but that’s if you like a more intellectual and hands on exercise but it’s intimately connected.

The power of being able to think logically through the problem?

Martin Evans: Oliver’s suggested that we might do an experiment and it goes wrong. An every day experience.

Oliver Smithies: That’s the usual.

Martin Evans: The usual situation, but the nice thing about it, the thing which gives you pleasure is that you can think about it and say, I know why it went wrong, or at least I’ve got an idea why it may have gone wrong. I can try it like this. That’ll probably go wrong as well but at least it’s a progressive intellectual exercise, and that provides feedback and pleasure.

And it’s sustainable.

Martin Evans: Sustainable, exactly.

Mario Capecchi: To me science almost has two opposites. You have one part where the details are very, very important, if you don’t pay attention to the details, the experiments aren’t going to work. You really think about the details and you think about setting up the experiment, you have a whole series of controls that tell you if something went wrong, didn’t get wrong. Then at the other end is thinking about something that’s worth doing. There you have to leap into the imagination and think, you’re thinking in the future rather than thinking about the immediate. They’re very difficult skills but you need both, because if you don’t ask the right question, you’re not going to go and ever achieve a good answer. So that part requires imagination, and the other part is the road part, but that’s again extremely important because if the experiment doesn’t work, you’re never going to get the answer. It’s different skill types in essence.

Feet on the ground and head in the clouds.

Mario Capecchi: That’s right.

Oliver Smithies: You mentioned details as one thing that comes to my mind when you mention that. I don’t allow radios in my lab during working time because what I say to people is you should be thinking about what you’re doing all the time, not with part of your brain. I think about it in this way, that when I’m pipetting something into a tube for example, with a micro pipette, I’m thinking about where do I put that tip? Do I pull it out of the solution, do I leave it in the solution? Even the simplest things you really have to think about if you’re going to do them well, so that you can repeat what you do. One shouldn’t be listening to the radio at the same time and if there’s music on then I will listen to the music, and that’s not what I should be doing, so that I don’t allow the radios in the lab.

Martin Evans: The only music I encourage is for the mice.

Oliver Smithies: You have music when you are dealing with the mice, yes.

Martin Evans: It’s not when you’re dealing with them, it could be well switched off then, but I do like and I do encourage to have a radio on in the animal house all the time particularly if you’ve got a sort of general programme, with a bit of music, a bit of piano, a few crashings and bangings and so on. The mice get used to this and so when you walk into the room they’re quite happy and relaxed. They think I’m Radio 4.

I suppose it is quite a Radio 4 voice.

Martin Evans: Maybe. This is one of the troubles, the technicians prefer Radio 2.

Interesting contrast. I was speaking to Aaron Ciechanover who of course was a Nobel Laureate for working out ubiquitination. He was saying that in his lab in Israel, he pipes music continuously into all the rooms to keep the students happy which is a very different way of doing things.

Oliver Smithies: Maybe it depends on the music really, because there’s some music, the great music anyway I suppose, not necessarily great music, but it gets into all of you and I can’t do my thinking if there’s music there. At least music that I want to listen to. But as you say, different people view it differently.

You brought up the mice and so let’s talk about the mice a little. The possibility you created, to insert a single gene or knock out a single gene in a mouse, has led to thousands of so-called mouse models in which the functions of genes have been investigated. Two decades on, or almost two decades on, from the creation of that model, would you like to discuss the pros and cons of that approach to mammalian genetics in the light of those mice?

Martin Evans: I think we have between us established a completely revolutionary approach to mammalian genetics which is in mice, but it has enormous connotations and importances for human genetics as well because we do tend to work in the same biological way. All the fundamental processes are very similar, and when they’re different, the differences are very eliminating. What we now have is a way when we can ask a question of what the inherited material, what our inheritance actually does. How are the instructions for the machine actually used to build the very complicated machine which is living organism, and the real importance is that we’re doing this in a way that we can ask the question, in the whole animal, in a fairly normal context, we can ask questions about its behaviour, we can ask questions about its ability to breed, about its ability to grow normally. All of these questions which you can’t ask a test tube.

Oliver Smithies: I would give an example of the work that I’ve been involved in, in relation to blood pressure. You can’t create blood pressure in a test tube. So if you’re going to study factors which affect blood pressure, you have to have some subject that has blood pressure, and a mouse has blood pressure and oddly enough, it’s blood pressure is very, very similar to human blood pressure, so you can study things then which in a human population you know only as an association. This and this genetic change is associated with let’s say high blood pressure, but in the mouse you can do an experiment to show that this and this difference causes a change in blood pressure. You can change the equation from being an association, meaning it’s possibly the cause to being a causation when you know that it really does cause a difference. That’s a tremendous step forward when you can make that sort of statement.

Another example might be arthrosclerosis and my wife’s work has been on that side. I want to put in a plug for her. Her work has inspired me to start my work in blood pressure that you can’t get again, you can’t get arthrosclerosis, plaques in the arteries, in the test tube. You have to have some animal to help you do that. We teach our students a great respect for the animals that they work with. It’s a privilege to be able to work with animals and you have to regard them as being precious and not to be wasted or trivialised or to be hurt when it’s possible to avoid the hurt. On the other hand, one can’t completely avoid the hurt in much of the same way as humans don’t avoid being hurt when they have a problem, when they have a disease or an accident. It’s a very special, I suppose gift is the right word, to be able to use animals to solve human problems.

Mario Capecchi: I think both Martin and Oliver articulated the pros. In terms of the cons, I think what we’re really interested in is human beings and that’s what we’re aiming our work towards, that’s where we hope that our work will help. I think where the difficulties become is where for example the complexities of how our mind works. I think the mechanics are going to be actually very similar. It’s not going to be that we think differently from a mouse, but the detail may be quite different and how well we’ll be able to model it. The other advantage of a human is that we can talk to the human, you can tell me if you have a headache. If I had to evaluate a mouse having a headache I would have a very difficult time doing that, so there are parameters that aren’t easy for us to attract. I think we just will have to see, to the level of complexity that we can apply.

I think the other limitation that I find all the time is that many problems involve multiple genes. Right now we’re more restricted to working one gene at a time. Now we have to essentially advance the technology to multiplex it so that we can work with multiple genes and look at the interactions of many genes as opposed to taking one gene away and asking what the consequences are. Whether ten different genes involved in this process and what happens when you start them up, modulating several genes that are different at the same time. I think there are layers of complexity that we’re still looking forward to and going to try to approach but it’s not going to be easy. Because the simple things are always the things that are done first and then the complexity starts coming in. But I think the other thing, what’s always to me is surprising is that when all of a sudden you think you’ve reached the very end, a new technology comes along and then all of a sudden everything breaks open again, for example, sequencing of the genome. Now that allows us to do things that were inconceivable just a few years ago. That layer puts a layer of complexity on it and it’s not only genome or two genomes, but there are going to be hundreds of genomes available that will be able to utilise all of this information in new ways that are unimaginable.

Would it be true to say that the sequencing of the mouse and human genomes made one realise that actually the mouse was a more appropriate model for humans than it was previously thought?

Mario Capecchi: Oh yes, I think in a whole, I mean some of the things are quite surprising. Things like behaviour you would think, no we’re completely different from mice, obviously, we’re much smarter and so on. But even in that level of detail we find enormous similarities, and there are psychiatric disorders that you can identify, genes that the mice will have, a neuro psychiatric disorder that humans are exhibiting. I think there will, until proven otherwise, we are very similar to mice and mice are very similar to us. But there will be differences and we’re going to have to be sensitive to those differences and what are we going to do to be able to approach those problems. Again, with environments, right now we maintain our mice in a little box which is a fairly … If I was put into that environment, I think the first thing would happen is I would go insane.

Oliver Smithies: Maybe the mice are insane.

Especially if you had to listen to Radio 2 all day.

Mario Capecchi: We have to be able to now introduce our environments which is another enormous variable and how do we introduce it and do it in an economic way and so and so. No, I think there are enormous challenges ahead and in a sense that’s terrific because that’s what the next generation’s going to do.

Martin Evans: I agree entirely with a lot of what Mario’s just said, but I don’t entirely agree with you that our main aim is to understand human physiology only. I think there is an enormous intellectual exercise for us in understanding the complexities of the biological world in which we live. We are part of the biological word, but we’re not all of the biological world. I think that we’ve been fortunate enough to be able to have a detailed study on mice in this case. There are other systems where you can have detailed studies in other model organisms we call them, organisms where you can do these types of studies. The whole of the advance of our understanding I think shouldn’t be overlooked. I think that if you look back over the last probably 200 years, maybe 300 years, there has been an enormous intellectual understanding of biology by human. It’s ongoing, we’re only part of the way there certainly. But I think it’s often overlooked, because of the practical purposes and people say oh yes there’s this benefit for medicine. Yes, it probably is. Yes, if we understand things better there’s a big benefit for medicine but I think that our primary purpose should be really the intellectual understanding from which practical benefits will flow sometimes, usually. But not necessarily that’s not the aim I don’t think.

Mario Capecchi: No, I would entirely agree with that. I think it’s, in a sense, all of our understanding of all of life rests on a few model organisms. If I can list them, certainly on two hands, then I really don’t need two hands to list all of those organisms. That’s our understanding of the whole biosphere in terms of molecular biology, what that throws away and it also emphasises essentially similarities, what we’re interested in those. What’s similar in yeast compared to mouse, compared to humans, because then we can go from one to the other. But there’s much more to be learned why we’re different, so then that requires in us now to start to look at all the different organisms, even if we look among mammals, the difference in sizes, capabilities, shapes are enormous. Yet we’re using the same genome to do all of that.

The question is how is that possible, how complex is that possible, and how would you even approach such a problem right now. I think we’re going to go in that direction and in a way, I think, the quickest way to go is maybe actually to go broad. It’s not that we should say we’ll only look at human disease in animals, in a mouse, but rather look at all the biology and once we understand the biology, once we understand how our brain works, we’re going to understand how neuropsychiatric disorders occur. And that might be much more rapid than simply going after what makes a neuropsychiatric disorder. I entirely agree that we have look broadly and in depth at many things throughout biology.

Martin Evans: Yes, I’m afraid this is one of the things that has bugged me a little bit. I think throughout, I’m asked for practical outcomes, and I like to say that my colleagues who are astronomers study the stars and many of us, and not just the scientists are very interested in the results. The cosmology’s publicly interesting. I think we should also be equally interested and I think the public should be equally interested in what I’m calling the stars within ourselves. In other words, our biological environment at which we’re part of and we’re in. I really think that in many cases this is underplayed and I think it does us a disservice, I think it does us a disservice for the younger generation for instance who perhaps don’t have the opportunity to realise the wonders that they’re presented with and the challenges they’re presented with.

That’s a marvellous thought to conclude with that it’s not all about human well-being, it’s about more than that.

Martin Evans: I think so.

Well, Martin Evans, Mario Capecchi, Oliver Smithies, thank you very much indeed for taking the time to speak with us today and I hope you very much enjoy your Nobel Week in Stockholm.

Martin Evans: I’m sure we will, thank you very much.

Watch the interview

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