May Brenner on Odile Crick
  May Brenner     Biography    
Recorded: 14 Jun 2005

Odile has been a friend of mine for more than forty-five years because my youngest daughter will be forty-five this year and it’s my older daughter who was a baby, nearly fifty years we have been friends. Well, we’ve been friends but when we were far apart, we didn’t write and phone every day or anything like that. We were enough in touch not to lose the friendship. It would be very hard. It would be very difficult. She is a very gentle person, creative too, of course. Very gentle, very easy to be with, very truthful, very straight. Oh, yes, of course, we talked and we grumbled a bit. But we laughed a lot at them, at us, at ourselves, you know. We were also grateful a lot. We could admit to each other our gratitude to be with men who were never boring and who always had something to tell us and to talk about and to make us think and who were extraordinary people. They just weren’t good scientists. Francis was—he was an extraordinary man as Sydney is in a different way. They were all quite different beginnings. But you felt you weren’t with—just think of all the people who were my dinner partners including the King of Sweden. No, he was lovely. It was a beautiful evening. It was great fun. It was really fun. But I suppose I have met many unusual or extraordinary people.

May Brenner was married to Sydney Brenner from December 1952 until her death in January 2010. She was engaged in doing a Ph.D. in Psychology in London.