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- Sydney observed, and predicted, the flow of science: “Progress depends on the interplay of techniques, discoveries, and ideas, probably in that order of decreasing importance,” he said. In 2002, he expressed an idea enabled by the new DNA sequencing technology, not yet called Big Data: “We must look at humanity's genome, not the human genome.
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May 17, 2019 · Science. 17 May 2019. Vol 364, Issue 6441. p. 638. DOI: 10.1126/science.aax8563. Contents. Sydney Brenner, an icon of science, died on 5 April at age 92. Sydney helped decipher the genetic code, he pioneered the use of Caenorhabditis elegans for genetic analysis, he made us think, and he made us laugh. Sydney was born in Germiston, South Africa ...
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638 17 MAY 2019 • VOL 364 ISSUE 6441 sciencemag.org SCIENCE...
- Sydney Brenner on the State
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- Sydney Brenner, 1927-2019
A scientific giant, Sydney Brenner has died at the age of...
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Sydney Brenner was one of the first to view James Watson and Francis Crick’s double helix model of DNA in April 1953. The 26-year-old biologist from South Africa was then a graduate student at the University of Oxford, UK. So enthralled was he by the insights from the structure that he determined on the spot to devote his life to understanding genes.
Iconoclastic and provocative, he became one of the leading biologists of the twentieth century. Brenner shared in the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for deciphering the genetics of programmed cell death and animal development, including how the nervous system forms. He was at the forefront of the 1975 Asilomar meeting to discuss the appropriate use of emerging abilities to alter DNA, was a key proponent of the Human Genome Project, and much more. He died on 5 April.
Brenner was born in 1927 in Germiston, South Africa, to poor immigrant parents. Bored by school, he preferred to read books borrowed (sometimes permanently) from the public library, or to dabble with a self-assembled chemistry set. His extraordinary intellect — he was reading newspapers by the age of four — did not go unnoticed. His teachers secured an award from the town council to send him to medical school.
Brenner entered the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg at the age of 15 (alongside Aaron Klug, another science-giant-in-training). Here, certain faculty members, notably the anatomist Raymond Dart, and fellow research-oriented medical students enriched his interest in science. On finishing his six-year course, his youth legally precluded him from practising medicine, so he devoted two years to learning cell biology at the bench. His passion for research was such that he rarely set foot on the wards — and he initially failed his final examination in internal medicine.
In 1952 Brenner won a scholarship to the Department of Physical Chemistry at Oxford. His adviser, Cyril Hinshelwood, wanted to pursue the idea that the environment altered observable characteristics of bacteria. Brenner tried to convince him of the role of genetic mutation. Two years later, with doctorate in hand, Brenner spent the summer of 1954 in the United States visiting labs, including Cold Spring Harbor in New York state. Here he caught up with Watson and Crick again.
•Nature Medicine: My Life in Science by Sydney Brenner
•Life's code script
- Errol Friedberg
- 2019
In 2018, the lectures were adapted into a popular science book titled Sydney Brenner's 10-on-10: The Chronicles of Evolution, published by Wildtype Books. Brenner also gave four lectures on the history of molecular biology, its impact on neuroscience and the great scientific questions that lie ahead.
Apr 26, 2024 · Sydney Brenner was a South-African born biologist who, with John E. Sulston and H. Robert Horvitz, won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 2002 for their discoveries about how genes regulate tissue and organ development via a key mechanism called programmed cell death, or apoptosis.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Jul 7, 2020 · As described in his autobiography, My life in Science, Brenner thought about how genetic information guides protein synthesis even before he saw the double helix model in April 1953 at Cambridge.
