11 APRIL 2003 VOL 300 SCIENCE www.sciencemag.org278Shortly after Sydney Brenner learned thathe and two former labmates had won the2002 Nobel Prize, he received this e-mailfrom a Chinese researcher: “I wish also towin a Nobel Prize. Please tell me how to doit.” The answer, Brenner announced at theaward ceremony last December, is simple.“First you must choose the right place …with generous sponsors to support you.” Inaddition, he urged, “choose excellent col-leagues.” For Brenner anda dozen other Nobel laure-ates, the right place wasCambridge, U.K., and theright people were theirpeers at one of the world’sfirst laboratories devotedto molecular biology.What started about 55years ago as a pilot pro-gram in biophysics at theUniversity of Cambridgeeventually became the Lab-oratory of Molecular Biol-ogy (LMB), now home toabout 300 researchers andalma mater to hundreds ofmolecular biology’s mostinfluential. Among thedozen Nobelists the lab hasspawned are James Watsonand Francis Crick, who co-discovered the structure ofDNA there 50 years ago.Watson has called LMB“the most productive center for biology in thehistory of science.” The lab’s recipe for success dates back toits early days, when leaders such as Max Perutz had the luck and insight to pick thebest and the brightest (among them somequite unorthodox choices) and secure themalmost unlimited support, both financial andcollegial. In the budding field of molecularbiology, “his operation became known as theplace to be,” says John Sulston, who sharedlast year’s Nobel Prize in physiology or medi-cine with Brenner and H. Robert Horvitz.The lab welcomed researchers who wan-dered across disciplines and then encouragedthem to interact closely. Even today, when in-terdisciplinary work has become de rigueur,LMB stands out for its cross-fertilization andcommunity spirit. Lab groups there remainsmall and flexible, sharing equipment andoften budgets. The fiefdoms that plague uni-versity departments are absent. “All theseelements add up to a strong formula for do-ing good science,” says LMB molecular bi-ologist Matthew Freeman.Although Watson and Crick are perhapsthe most famous, the list of 750 or so alum-ni reads like a Fortune 500 of biology. Sci-entists there essentially created the field ofstructural biology. Over the past 5 decades,they invented key technologies such asDNA sequencing. And they have helped toelucidate some of the most fundamentalquestions in biology: how genes carry theinstructions for proteins, for instance, andhow a single cell develops into an animal. One great mind begat another, as the lin-eage of Nobel laureates makes clear (seegraphic). Prize winner William LawrenceBragg, director of the physics lab whereLMB was conceived, brought in Max Perutz, who in turn recruited John Kendrewand Crick. Crick attracted Watson andBrenner. Brenner’s protégés included Sulston and Horvitz. When then-director Perutz moved the labto its own building in 1962, FrederickSanger and Aaron Klug came on board.Sanger brought in César Milstein and JohnWalker. Perutz, Kendrew, Crick, and Watsonwon their prizes in 1962. Sanger claimedone in 1958 and a second in 1980; Klug gar-nered the prize in 1982; Milstein and hisstudent, Georges Köhler, in 1984; andWalker in 1997. The most recent winnersare Brenner, Sulston, and Horvitz.Can such stellar results continue? Big labsthat churn out lots of data already threaten thelab’s preeminence. And the lab’s own expo-nential growth threatens to dilute the intenseinteractions that have characterized the place.But LMB’s current director, structural biolo-gist Richard Henderson, feels confident it willstill provide fertile soil. As Perutz once wrote,“Well-run laboratories canfoster [creativity in science].But discoveries cannot beplanned; they pop up, likePuck, in unexpected corners.” Roots in physicsLMB had it origins in the illustrious 19th centuryCavendish Laboratory, part ofthe University of Cambridge.Cavendish scientists excelledin physics. J. J. Thomson discovered the electron there,and Ernest Rutherfordsmashed the atom. In 1915, Bragg, workingwith his father at theCavendish, became theyoungest person to win aNobel Prize. The father-sonteam’s success set the stagefor a new direction for thelab: biophysics. They hadfigured out how to use x-raycrystallography to probe the inner nature ofcrystals. In so doing, they created a windowinto the molecular structure of biologicalmaterials as well. After World War II, Bragg was finallyable to sneak biology through the lab’s backdoor. Knowing that the Medical ResearchCouncil (MRC)—even then the United King-dom’s biggest research supporter—was keenon melding physics and biology, he con-vinced it to create the MRC Unit for Re-search on the Molecular Structure of Biologi-cal Systems in 1947. Its two members werePerutz, a chemist who wanted to try x-raycrystallography on proteins, and his student,physical chemist Kendrew. For the next 10years, Perutz and Kendrew raced to identifythe molecular makeup of two key blood pro-teins, myoglobin and hemoglobin. They de-vised better ways of doing x-ray crystallogra-CREDIT:AP PHOTOB UILDING ON THE DNA REVOLUTIONS PECIAL S ECTIONNEWS A Hothouse of Molecular BiologyGreen thumbs at a British lab helped cultivate the achievements of themuch-feted Watson and Crick and a slew of other luminaries. Can its success be duplicated, or even sustained? Prized moment. Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkins, John Steinbeck (Nobel laureate inliterature), James Watson, Max Perutz, and John Kendrew (left to right) all left Stock-holm with Nobel Prizes in hand.phy and faster ways of analyzing the reams ofdata generated—harnessing the mathematicsdepartment’s primitive electronic digital com-puter for their calculations. Perutz recruited allies from diverse back-grounds: Crick was a physicist, Watson a zo-ologist, and Brenner a physician. Space wastight. Crick and Watson—and, later, Crickand Brenner—sat back to back in one office.“By 1956,” Perutz wrote, “the Unit hadgrown so large, I spent my time scroungingfor a little bench space in a butterfly museumhere or the abandoned cyclotron roomthere.” Together—closely—they began toturn biology on its ear.Life’s secretWatson and Crick shared acommon passion: to figureout what genes were made of.Crick, like many of his con-temporaries, thought geneswere proteins; Watson be-lieved they consisted of DNA. Soon after Watson arrivedin