Of mice and men...and a good fellow at heart

MUMBAI: With his ponytail and glittering black shirt and tie, Peter Goodfellow looks more like a rock musician than one of Britain''s topmost scientists.
He''s a citation superstar on the list of most-cited UK researchers and his work on the genetics of sex determination led to the creation of the world''s first sex-reversed mouse—a genetically conceived Minnie Mouse which became Randy the Rat with a single shot of gene, originally cloned in 1990 by Dr Goodfellow and his colleagues at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (ICRF).
Dr Goodfellow was in the city, courtesy a British foreign office invitation, to celebrate 50 years of the discovery of DNA''s double helix, and delivered a public lecture at the British Council on Tuesday.
In a freewheeling chat with TNN, Dr Goodfellow, now head of discovery research at GlaxoSmithKline, said his main goal was to translate the sort of knowledge he helped create as an academic into treatments for people.
"If you ask what I worry about today, it''s chemistry—for every new drug we make, we have to make 20,000 molecules and it costs roughly 800 million dollars in research and development," he said. "But if you ask me what I will be worrying about tomorrow, it would be IT. From having about ten million data points a year, we will be going on to 100 million data points," he added.
Dr Goodfellow moved from Oxford to ICRF, where his group made the crucial discovery that showed that the distance between the sexes, Mars and Venus, might be closer than previously thought. This involved the cloning of a crucial gene called SRY, which is normally found only in the male Y chromosome.Other scientists used the gene to create Randy, the world''s first sex-reversed mouse. Randy began life as a female embryo.
However, an SRY injection caused her to be born as a male in every discernible way. For instance, when in a cage with some females, Randy behaved in accordance with his name— mating up to six times a night.
"They thought he was a male, he thought he was a male and we thought that was pretty good evidence," a researcher involved in the sexual sleight of hand recalled. "It tells you that SRY is the only gene you need on the Y chromosome to develop testes and become male."
Incidentally, Dr Goodfellow got his ponytail thanks to his wife, Julia, the renowned biophysicist who heads Britain''s Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council.
She negotiated it as a forfeit instead of him piercing his ears and wearing earrings, which he''d promised his group he would do if he moved from ICRF to academia.