Mel sydney brenner biography

Between 1954 and 1956, Brenner taught physiology at Wits – the only time he was employed in South Africa.
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An avid reader Sydney Brenner was born on January 13th 1927 in Germiston to Jewish immigrants from Russia.

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Sydney Brenner: A Nobel Prize winner’s life dedicated to science

In the more than eight decades that Nobel Laureate, Prof Sydney Brenner, has all-consumingly devoted his life to science, he twice wrote powerful proposals of no longer than a page. Short but sweet, these kick-started the two projects that are part of his lasting legacy.

The first was to request funding to study a worm, because he saw in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans the ideal genetic model organism. He was right, and received the Nobel Prize for his efforts. The other proposal, which set out how Singapore could become a hub for biomedical research, earned him the title of “mentor to a nation’s science ambitions”. Brenner’s way of approaching a task or a problem is often atypical, but it bears much fruit. Former colleague David Lane explains in Sydney Brenner: A Biography by Errol C Friedberg: “Those who want things to be very structured and stable don’t suit Sydney’s personality very well. He’s the sort of guy who enjoys tossing the hand grenade around. He asks the tough questions and if he sees th

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AsianScientist (Apr. 5, 2019) – Dr. Sydney Brenner, the visionary molecular biologist and Nobel laureate who turned a humble soil worm into one of the most-studied organisms in biology, died on April 5, 2019 in Singapore. He was 92.

In the 1960s, Brenner pioneered the use of Caenorhabditis elegans, a one-millimetre-long nematode worm with a translucent body and simple nervous system, as a model for understanding human biology. Since then, scores of researchers have used C. elegans to pick apart fundamental cellular processes such as cell division, embryo development, aging and cell death.

Few scientists make their mark on even one specialized field of research, but Brenner’s scientific career was marked by its versatility. A contemporary of Francis Crick and James Watson (who together with other researchers deduced the double helix structure of DNA in 1953), Brenner was instrumental in deciphering the basic principles of the genetic code—the instructions by which DNA codes for proteins.

As biologists went from studying individual genes to scanning entire geno

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