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[70] [71] He was an atheist. [72] Brenner died on 5 April 2019, in Singapore, at the age of 92. [10] [73] [74]
Apr 5, 2019 · Sydney Brenner, one of the giants of 20th Century science, has died. The South African of Lithuanian descent made many pioneering discoveries in the field of molecular and developmental biology...
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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
Apr 5, 2019 · Sydney Brenner, the Nobel laureate whose studies on the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans led to seminal discoveries in genetics and developmental biology, died today in Singapore. He was 92 years old. Brenner discovered fundamental steps in how cells use DNA to make the proteins that enable life.
Apr 5, 2019 · The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2002. Born: 13 January 1927, Germiston, South Africa. Died: 5 April 2019, Singapore. Affiliation at the time of the award: The Molecular Sciences Institute, Berkeley, CA, USA.
Apr 5, 2019 · He was 92 years old. “Collaborating with Sydney not only made all the difference to my ideas and my few experiments but it was all such fun,” wrote Francis Crick, the codiscoverer of DNA who shared an office with Brenner at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in the UK, in a tribute to Brenner in The Scientist in 2002.
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Apr 5, 2019 · Sydney Brenner was born on 13 January 1927 in Germiston (then in the Transvaal, today in Gauteng), South Africa, the son of Jewish immigrants - Morris, a shoemaker originally from Lithuania, and his wife Leah (née Blecher), originally from Riga, Latvia.
