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Sydney Brenner

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Born: January 12 1927

Died: 0404 04 20192019

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Sydney Brenner, was is a South African biologist and a 2002 Nobel prize in Physiology or Medicine laureate, shared with H. Robert Horvitz and John Sulston.

Brenner made significant contributions to work on the genetic code, and other areas of molecular biology while working in the Medical Research Council Unit in Cambridge, England.

He established the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans as a model organism for the investigation of developmental biology, and founded the Molecular Sciences Institute in Berkeley, California, U.S..

Brenner was born in the small town of Germiston, South Africa. His father, a cobbler, came to South Africa from Lithuania in 1910, and his mother, from Riga, Latvia, in 1922. Educated at Germiston High School and the University of the Witwatersrand, he received an 1851 Exhibition Scholarship from the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 which enabled him to complete a D.Phil. from Exeter College, Oxford. He then spent the next 20 years at the Medical Research Council Unit in Cambridge; here, during the 1960s, he contributed to molecular biology, then an emerging field. In 1976 he joined the Salk Institute in California.

He was married to Dr. May 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. He lives in Ely, Cambridgeshire.

The "American plan" and "European Plan" were proposed by Sydney Brenner as competing models for the way brain cells determine their neural functions.

According to the European plan , the function of cells is determined by its genetic lineage. Therefore, a mother cell with a specific function would create daughter cells with similar functions.

According to the American plan, a brain cell's function is determined by the function of its neighbors after cell migration. If a cell migrates to an area in the visual cortex, the cell will adopt the function of its neighboring visual cortex cells, guided by chemical and axonal signals from these cells. If the same cell migrates to the auditory cortex, it would develop functions related to hearing, regardless of its genetic lineage.

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Sydney Brenner

Sydney Brenner

Books from Sydney Brenner

The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing

My Life in Science (Lives in Science)

Loose Ends ... False Starts

In the Spirit of Science: Lectures by Sydney Brenner on DNA, Worms and Brains

Ciência, Ética e Cidadania: Reflexões de Cientistas Nobel

Sydney Brenner's 10-on-10: The Chronicles of Evolution

Viure per a la ciència

Encyclopedia of Genetics, Four-Volume Set

Molecular Biology: A Selection of Papers

Brenner's Encyclopedia of Genetics

Telomeres and Telomerase