Sydney Brenner
Brenner went on to pioneer another major breakthrough in
biology: identifying and developing the transparent worm C. elegans as
an ideal animal model; the worm is used today in labs worldwide. His
early research on C. elegans and studies in the years that followed led
to winning the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2002 with two
colleagues, John Sulston and H. Robert Horvitz. The Nobel Committee
wrote that the worm research helped identify “key genes regulating
organ development and programmed cell death ... and it shed new light
on the pathogenesis of many diseases.”
Brenner was born to Jewish émigré parents in South Africa, where
his father worked as a cobbler, and he showed an early precocity for
science, entering medical school in Johannesburg at age 15. Brenner
quickly gravitated to genetics research: He met DNA co-discoverer
Francis Crick in 1953, and soon relocated to the University of
Cambridge in the United Kingdom to work alongside him. As The
Guardian said in an obituary, Brenner and Crick “shared an office for 20
years, talking non-stop, laughing uproariously and generating hundreds
of ideas, which they tested in the laboratory with their indispensable
research assistant Leslie Barnett.”