Sydney Brenner

Sydney Brenner was born above his father's cobbler's shop in Germiston, the son of a Lithuanian immigrant who never learned to read. He entered the University of the Witwatersrand at fifteen, went to Oxford on a scholarship, and settled at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, where he shared an office with Francis Crick for twenty years.

He was in the room for much of the founding of molecular biology. With Crick and others he showed in 1961 that the genetic code is read in non-overlapping triplets, and in the same year he was part of the work demonstrating the existence of messenger RNA — the molecule that carries the instruction from gene to protein.

Then he changed the question. Having helped establish how genes are read, he asked how they build an animal, and in 1963 proposed that the field needed a new organism simple enough to be understood completely. He picked Caenorhabditis elegans, a soil nematode a millimetre long and transparent, with exactly 959 cells in the adult. His group traced the lineage of every one of those cells from the fertilised egg, and mapped every connection in its nervous system — the first complete wiring diagram of any animal.

That work revealed that some cells are programmed to die as a normal part of development, a mechanism central to cancer and to degenerative disease. It brought him the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2002, with John Sulston and Robert Horvitz. He was also among the most quoted men in science, and did not spare his colleagues.