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Sydney Brenner was born in 1927 in South Africa, educated at the local Germiston High School and at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg where he obtained a first degree in medicine in 1951. Wanting to get into basic medical research, he applied to Sir Cyril Hinshelwood in Oxford and took up a one year research post there in 1952, working on phage genetics. In April 1953, he came with a group from Oxford to see the newly-built DNA model in Cambridge, and met Crick and Watson. After further meetings with them in the US in 1954, he was invited to join the MRC unit in Cambridge, and a post was created for him to take up from 1957. Brenner and Crick shared an office for the next 20 years. At the MRC unit, Brenner initially set up a laboratory for phage work, and in 1961, the group that developed was able to prove the triplet nature of the genetic code by using a genetic approach. The same year, Brenner with François Jacob and Matthew Meselson demonstrated the existence of messenger RNA. In the course of the phage work, he became interested in their physiology. This led to the development with Robert Horne of the Cavendish Laboratory, of the technique of negative staining as an easy and rapid way of preparing specimens for the electron microscope which helped to transform it from a specialist tool to an everyday routine one. Soon after the move of the unit to the new LMB building, where Crick and Brenner were directors of the Molecular Genetics Division, plans were discussed with the MRC for future development. Crick and Brenner “felt strongly that most of the classical problems of molecular biology had been solved, and that the future lay in tackling more complex problems….”. They concluded that the most interesting fields to branch out into would be the investigation of the development and of the nervous system. Alongside other approaches, Sydney felt there was a need to find a small organism which could reproduce rapidly but with fully differentiated cells and a nervous system. |
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The chosen organism was the small nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans. It has a short generation time and is transparent, so that it is possible to follow cell division directly under the microscope. By 1974, Brenner had demonstrated that specific gene mutations could be induced in the genome of C.elegans by ethyl methane sulphonate and had completed a genetic analysis of the organism. Different mutations were linked to specific genes and to specific effects on organ development. His work laid the foundation for that of Sulston and Horvitz. He became Director of the LMB in 1979, but retired from this in 1986, when he left LMB to lead a Molecular Genetics unit in the adjacent Addenbrooke’s Hospital until 1992. From 1996 to 2001 he was the Director of the Molecular Sciences Institute in Berkeley, California. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1965. |
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