A Conversation with Andrew Benson

First shown in a seminar by Bob B. Buchanan on July 27 2012 at the Calvin Laboratory University of California Berkeley to mark the departure of the Energy Biosciences Institute to a new building. To view the video with captions in English or 1 of 100 other languages follow the instructions below. YOUTUBE VIDEO INSTRUCTIONS 1. Navigate to the video page: 2. Click the Closed Caption track 2nd icon on bottom-right of video player CC to activate the on-screen captioning options dialog. English will show up automatically. 3. Select Translate Captions from the captioning dialog drop-down menu 4. A new dialog appears Translate... - select the language from the scrollable popup list Afrikaans is the first item displayed click on this and then use the light grey slider box to scroll down the list of languages available 5. Confirm OK in the Translate... dialog To activate a real-time scroll of the entire transcript either translated or in English click the Transcript icon the 4th from the left in the list of links below the main title of the video A Conversation with Andrew Benson - About Share Add to ICON Transcript ICON Statistics ICON Report. Complete transcript: Buchanan BB and Wong JH 2013 Photosynthesis Research 114:207--214 and A Conversation with Andrew Benson How plants use carbon dioxide is at the heart of biology but it wasnt until Andrew Benson 39 got together with Melvin Calvin a UC Berkeley chemistry professor in the years following World War II that the process was elucidated. This videotaped interview captures Bensons perspective on their collaboration. Ernest Lawrence director of what became the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory saw the research potential of carbon-14 a radioactive isotope that became available after the war and encouraged Calvin to apply it to photosynthesis. Calvin in turn hired Benson who is now an emeritus professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla California. Benson brought expertise in organic chemistryspecifically in carbohydrate chemistryalong with research experience with photosynthesis and carbon-14. The pair conducted seminal work on the problem from 1946 to 1954 and together with many collaborators revealed how CO2 functions in plants thus answering a centuries-old question that opened the door to a new realm of advances in biology and chemistry. Specifically they identified the series of reactions by which plants use CO2 in photosynthesis. The pathway is called the Calvin-Benson Cycle. In 1961 Calvin was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Bob Buchanan a UC Berkeley professor of plant and microbial biology videotaped an interview with Benson to record his story for posterity. I think students will be very interested to hear Benson describe the process by which he and Calvin developed the science and made their discoveries Buchanan said. There was also controversy over the Nobel not being shared given Bensons critical photosynthesis work and this video puts Bensons perspective on that matter an admirable one I think in the historical record. The interview is also a revealing portrait of what it was like to work in Berkeleys Old Radiation Laboratory in an era when radioactive materials were novel and safety procedures were less developed. The Bancroft Library on the Berkeley campus will house the videos transcript in its oral histories collection and the video will be housed in its motion picture collection. Complete transcript: Buchanan BB and Wong JH 2013 Photosynthesis Research 114:207--214 and A Conversation with Andrew Benson,

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