Transcript Causes of Cellular Injury

Sydney Brenner
by Andrew Brenner
Early Life
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Sydney Brenner was born in 1927 in Germinston,
South Africa
He discovered the Germinston Public Library
(funded by Carnegie) which inspired his thirst for
knowledge
By the age of 15, Sydney was attending
university in Johannesburg to study medicine
By 1942, Sydney was studying physics,
chemistry, and botany
Career
Sydney remained in South Africa until he
received his masters in science
 By 1952, Sydney had attended Oxford to
work on his PhD in a physical chemistry
laboratory
 In April 1953, Sydney visited Cambridge
to view the proposed model of DNA
Watson and Crick had developed
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Career
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After finishing his PhD, Sydney had returned to
South Africa to open up his own research lab
The lab was part of the Physiology Dept. at South
Africa Medial School
He had opened up this lab to extend the field of
molecular biology
Research at the lab included developing a
bacteriophage system to elucidate the genetic
code
In 1956, he left to England to continue
researching with Crick
Career
In 1961, the Crick, Brenner et al.
experiment was performed
 This experiment elucidated the triplet
codon system for correspondence to
amino acids
 The experiment also made the existence
of frame-shift mutations apparent
 The experiment was performed using T4
bacteriophages.
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Career
As Max Perutz was retiring in 1979,
Sydney was appointed Director of the MRC
lab as a successor
 During his time as Director, he became
interested in DNA sequencing
 Became an active proponent in the early
stages of the Human Genome Project
 In 1986, he took the opportunity to leave
his Director’s position to continue doing
research
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Nobel Prize
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Sydney began focusing on using C. elegans as a
model organism for research involving animal
and specifically neural development in the early
2000s
He chose this worm as a model organism because
it is simple to study, easy to grow, and
convenient for genetic analysis
In 2002, he won the Nobel Prize for his research
on C. elegans with which he shared with H.
Robert Horvitz and John Sulston
The End
Sources
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/l
aureates/2002/brenner-autobio.html
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biograp
hy/Sydney_Brenner.html
http://www.salk.edu/faculty/brenner.html