- Born
- Died
- Sydney Brenner was born on January 13, 1927 in Germiston, Gauteng, South Africa. He was married to May Covitz Balkind. He died on April 5, 2019 in Singapore.
- SpouseMay Covitz Balkind(1952 - January 4, 2010) (her death, 3 children)
- Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2002 co-winner.
- His parents were Jewish emigres from eastern Europe. His father, a cobbler, was illiterate; the family lived in the back of his shop.
- He entered medical school at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg when he was only 15. He won a scholarship to study with chemist (and future Nobel laureate) Cyril Hinshelwood at the University of Oxford, where he received his doctorate.
- He spent much of his career at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England, where he shared an office with Francis Crick. He sought a model organism to study animal development at the genetic level, a new field at the time. The "winner" was Caenorhabditis elegans, a tiny, transparent roundworm. His research on C. elegans earned him a share of the 2002 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for "seminal discoveries concerning the genetic regulation of organ development and programmed cell death," which "have shed new light on the pathogenesis of many diseases," including cancer and AIDS. His co-laureates are John E. Sulston of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, England, and H. Robert Horvitz of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
- He founded the Molecular Sciences Institute in Berkeley, California. He was the director there until 2001, when he joined the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California.
- I'm a strong believer that ignorance is important in science. If you know too much, you start seeing why things won't work. That's why it's important to change your field to collect more ignorance.
- Without doubt, the fourth winner of the Nobel Prize this year is Caenorhabditis elegans; it deserves all of the honor but, of course, it will not be able to share the monetary award. [from his Nobel lecture]
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