“A precocious boy – a student at the University of the Witwatersrand by the time he was 15 – and bullied for it, reading was his connection to the wider world.

Courses, he said, never taught him anything. The way to learn was to get a book that told you how to do things, and then to start doing them, whether it was making dyes or, later in life, programming computers.

If he thought more deeply than the other great biologists of his age, which he did, it was surely because he read further, too.”

Reference

The Economist. (2019) Obituary: Sydney Brenner. The Economist. 20 April 2019, pp.82.