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Jun 7, 2021 · In 1961, Francis Crick and Sydney Brenner, together with two Cambridge colleagues, published an article in Nature that used simple genetic experiments to demonstrate that the genetic code was almost certainly based on groups of three nucleotides. Six decades later, this article continues to be an inspiration to scientists due to its elegant argumentation and its use of simple, powerful ...
- Matthew Cobb
- 2021
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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
Jun 7, 2021 · statement has been added.] Abstract. In 1961, Francis Crick and Sydney Brenner, together with two Cambridge colleagues, published an article in Nature that used simple genetic experiments to ...
The Crick, Brenner et al. experiment (1961) was a scientific experiment performed by Francis Crick, Sydney Brenner, Leslie Barnett and R.J. Watts-Tobin. It was a key experiment in the development of what is now known as molecular biology and led to a publication entitled "The General Nature of the Genetic Code for Proteins" and according to the historian of Science Horace Judson is "regarded ...
Meanwhile, back in Cambridge, Brenner, microbiologist Leslie Bar-nett and physicist Richard Watts-Tobin, who was at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology working on acridine induction of mutations, were hard at work. Brenner kept Crick up to date by letter, describing their progress – or lack of it. On 27 July 1961, Brenner wrote to Crick in
- Matthew Cobb
- 2021
Jun 6, 2019 · From the late 1950s until the late 1970s, Brenner and Crick shared an office, maintaining their cohabitation through a series of moves as what became the Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) took form and then went from one building to another. Every day the two would talk together, endlessly, about science.
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Jul 7, 2020 · Four years later, the secret of the mysterious Volkin-Astrachan RNA was uncovered in Brenner’s living room. It was during an informal meeting of a small group of scientists, including Crick and François Jacob from Institut Pasteur in France. Jacob described the new findings from the famous Pardee, Jacob and Monod (PaJaMo) mating experiment.
