Sydney Brenner

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Sydney Brenner,CH (born January 13, 1927) is a British biologist active in the United States.

Born in Germiston, South Africa, he made seminal contributions to the emerging field of molecular biology in the 1960s, notably in the elucidation of the triplet code of protein translation through the Crick, Brenner et al. experiment of 1961, which discovered frameshift mutations. This insight provided early elucidation of the genetic code.

Brenner then turned his sights on establishing Caenorhabditis elegans as a model organism for the investigation of animal development including neural development. Brenner chose this 1 millimeter-long soil roundworm mainly because it is simple, is easy to grow in bulk populations, and turned out be quite convenient for genetic analysis. The title of his Nobel lecture on December 2002, "Nature's Gift to Science" (which can be downloaded from [1]), is an homage to this modest nematode, and he considered that having chosen the right organism turned out to be as important as having addressed the right problems to work on.

For the latter work he shared the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with H. Robert Horvitz and John Sulston.

Brenner founded the Molecular Sciences Institute and is currently associated with the Salk Institute and the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology. Known for his penetrating scientific insight and acerbic wit, Brenner for many years penned a regular column ("Loose Ends") in the journal Current Biology; he wrote "A Life In Science" (ISBN 0954027809) paperback published by Biomed Central Ltd. in 2001:

"Seeing DNA ...of course the most important thing that happened then is that Jack Dunitz told me about all the developments with DNA in Cambridge because he was following it all. He told me that Francis Crick and Jim Watson had solved the structure of DNA, so we decided to go across to Cambridge to see it. This was in April of 1953.Jack and I and Leslie [Orgel] and another crystallographer went to Cambridge by car. It was a small car. It was very cold I remember, and the car wasn't heated. No one had heaters in cars then. We must have arrived in Cambridge in the late morning, at about 11am or thereabouts. We went into the Austin wing of the Cavendish Laboratory. I went in with Jack and Leslie, into this room that was lined with brick, and there on the side I can remember very clearly was this small model with plates for the bases - the original model with everything screwed together. And I could see the double helix! Francis was sitting there. This was the first time I met him and of course he couldn't stop talking. He just went on and on and on, and it was very inspiring, you see. Of course at this stage neither of the two famous Nature papers had yet appeared. The first paper was expected in a few weeks. They talked mainly about what eventually was in the second paper. Jim was at his desk in that room which I came to occupy later when I came to the Cavendish, and he was interspersing comments with Francis. So that's when I saw the DNA model for the first time, in the Cavendish, and that's when I saw that this was it. And in a flash you just knew that this was very fundamental. The curtain had been lifted and everything was now clear [as to] what to do. And I got tremendously excited by this."

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