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John Sulston was born in 1942 and educated at the Merchant Taylor’s School in Northwood, Middlesex, and at Pembroke College, Cambridge, graduating in 1963. He joined the Chemistry Department in Cambridge, gained his PhD for research in nucleotide chemistry, and continued in this field studying the early prebiotic chemistry of life as a postdoctoral fellow with Leslie Orgel at the Salk Institute for three years. In 1969 he was invited to join Sydney Brenner’s group at LMB to analyze the neurochemistry of the nematode worm C.elegans. He began by producing a plot of the patterns of the neurons from microscopy of specimens labelled with fluorescent derivatives of neurotransmitters. He also determined that the total worm genome was 20 times that of the bacterium E.coli (i.e. about 100 Mb). He then became interested in working out the cell lineages, initially in part of the nervous system, but later in the whole organism. According to the textbook this was established in the embryo stage, but Sulston found there to be 15 neurons in the ventral cord in young larvae, and 57 in older animals. Using a light microscope (with Nomarski optics) he “tethered” live young worms by providing a limited lawn of bacteria on a slide, and watched their growth. Over one weekend, he was able to account for the origins of the 42 post-embryonic neural cells, and the entire development of the ventral cord. |
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All the cell divisions from the fertilized egg to the 959 somatic cells in the adult nematode were then mapped and the lineage, published in 1983, found to be invariant. It was also found that specific cells in the lineage always die by programmed cell death. Sulston described the visible steps in the cellular death process and demonstrated the first mutation of a gene participating in programmed cell death, the nuc-1 gene, and in 1983, his group identified two other genes involved, ced-1 and ced-2. From 1983, Sulston was involved in genome sequencing, firstly of the nematode C.elegans, published in1998, and then the human genome, published in draft form in 2000. He had moved from LMB to be Director of the new Sanger Centre from 1993 until 2000. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1986, and was knighted in 2001. |
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