Sydney Brenner

Brenner, the son of Lithuanian and Latvian Jewish immigrants to South Africa, was a founding figure of molecular biology who helped establish the existence of messenger RNA and the triplet genetic code. To study how genes build a body, he chose the tiny worm C. elegans as a model organism and traced the fate of every one of its cells. This work, revealing the genetic control of organ development and of programmed cell death (apoptosis), won him a share of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.