Sydney Brenner—a personal perspective
- Byrappa Venkatesh, PhD
- Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology, A*STAR, Singapore and Department of Paediatrics, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore Singapore
This extract was created in the absence of an abstract.
(IMAGE COURTESY OF OKINAWA INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY)
Sydney Brenner (1927–2019), a pioneering molecular biologist and scientific giant, passed away recently at the age of 92. This is a personal perspective on Sydney based on my association with him during the last 28 years.
Sydney was born on January 13, 1927 in Germiston, a small town in South Africa. After completing a degree in Medicine and another one in Science at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, he obtained a DPhil degree from the Oxford University in 1954. He returned briefly to South Africa before joining Francis Crick at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, UK in 1956 to start a brilliant career in molecular biology that spanned more than six decades and three continents (Europe, North America, and Asia). During his career, Sydney made several seminal discoveries including cracking the genetic code (Brenner 1957; Crick et al. 1961), codiscovering messenger RNA (Brenner et al. 1961), establishing the tiny roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans as a genetic model (Brenner 1974; White et al. 1986), introducing the compact genome of the pufferfish (Takifugu rubripes, aka fugu) as a model vertebrate genome (Brenner et al. 1993), and pioneering next-generation sequencing by inventing the microbead array-based DNA sequencing technology (Brenner et al. 2000a,b). In 2002, Sydney together with John Sulston and Robert Horvitz was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for deciphering the genetic regulation of animal development and programmed cell death using C. elegans as a model.
Among other achievements, Sydney made a landmark contribution to genomics, particularly comparative genomics, whereby genomes of animals distantly related to human are compared with the human genome to identify conserved sequences that play a role in their shared phenotypes, and to highlight sequences unique to human and other lineages that potentially contribute to their derived …
