Sydney Brenner

Origins and early life

Sydney Brenner was born on 13 January 1927 in Germiston, South Africa, where his first home was in rooms behind his father's shoe-repair shop. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, his father having come from Lithuania in 1910 and his mother from Latvia in 1922, and his father, who never learned to read or write, spoke English, Yiddish, Russian, Afrikaans and Zulu.

Work and career

A town council bursary took him at fifteen, in 1942, to the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, where he was drawn into research on cells and genetics before taking his medical degrees in 1951. He went to Oxford in 1952 for a doctorate in physical chemistry, and in April 1953 drove to Cambridge to see the model of DNA that Francis Crick and James Watson had just built. In December 1956 he joined the Medical Research Council unit in Cambridge, shared an office with Crick for twenty years, and in 1960 and 1961 helped prove the existence of messenger RNA and show that the genetic code is read in triplets.

In the early 1960s he looked for a simple animal in which to study how genes build a body and its nervous system, and chose the transparent roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans. His paper of 1974 showed how mutations could be induced in the worm and linked to specific genes and to effects on development, the foundation on which John Sulston and Robert Horvitz then built. He directed the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge from 1979 to 1986 and founded the Molecular Sciences Institute in Berkeley in 1995.

Recognition

In 2002 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Robert Horvitz and John Sulston, “for their discoveries concerning genetic regulation of organ development and programmed cell death”. Married to May Covitz from 1952 until her death in 2010, he died on 5 April 2019, aged 92, in Singapore, where he had long helped to build biomedical research.