Sydney Brenner established the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans as a model organism for the investigation of developmental biology, and founded the Molecular Sciences Institute in Berkeley, California, United States.
18 Facts About Sydney Brenner
2.
Sydney Brenner was born in the town of Germiston in the then Transvaal, South Africa, on 13 January 1927.
3.
Sydney Brenner stayed on for two more years doing an Honours degree and then an MSc degree, supporting himself by working part-time as a laboratory technician.
4.
Sydney Brenner received an 1851 Exhibition Scholarship from the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 which enabled him to complete a Doctor of Philosophy degree at the University of Oxford as a postgraduate student of Exeter College, Oxford, supervised by Cyril Hinshelwood.
5.
Sydney Brenner spent the next 20 years at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge.
6.
Sydney Brenner made several seminal contributions to the emerging field of molecular biology in the 1960s.
7.
Sydney Brenner collaborating with Sarabhai, Stretton and Bolle in 1964, using amber mutants defective in the bacteriophage T4D major head protein, showed that the nucleotide sequence of the gene is co-linear with the amino acid sequence of the encoded polypeptide chain.
8.
Sydney Brenner then focused on establishing a free-living roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans as a model organism for the investigation of animal development including neural development.
9.
Sydney Brenner chose this 1-millimeter-long soil roundworm mainly because it is simple, is easy to grow in bulk populations, and turned out to be quite convenient for genetic analysis.
10.
Sydney Brenner founded the Molecular Sciences Institute in Berkeley, California in 1996.
11.
Sydney Brenner was on the Board of Scientific Governors at The Scripps Research Institute, as well as being Professor of Genetics there.
12.
Sydney Brenner wrote "A Life in Science", a paperback published by BioMed Central.
13.
Sydney Brenner is noted for his generosity with ideas and the great number of students and colleagues his ideas have stimulated.
14.
In 2017, Sydney Brenner co-organized a seminal lecture series in Singapore describing ten logarithmic scales of time from the Big Bang to the present, spanning the appearance of multicellular life forms, the evolution of humans, and the emergence of language, culture and technology.
15.
Sydney Brenner gave four lectures on the history of molecular biology, its impact on neuroscience and the great scientific questions that lie ahead.
16.
The "American plan" and "European plan" were proposed by Sydney Brenner as competing models for the way brain cells determine their neural functions.
17.
Sydney Brenner was married to May Sydney Brenner from December 1952 until her death in January 2010; their children include Belinda, Carla, Stefan, and his stepson Jonathan Balkind from his wife's first marriage to Marcus Balkind.
18.
Sydney Brenner died on 5 April 2019, in Singapore, at the age of 92.