Sydney Brenner

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Esther Lederberg , Gunther Stent , Sydney Brenner and Joshua Lederberg , 1965

Sydney Brenner (born January 13, 1927 in Germiston , South African Union ; † April 5, 2019 in Singapore ) was a British biologist who primarily worked as a developmental biologist and won the Nobel Prize for 2002 together with H. Robert Horvitz and John E. Sulston Medicine and physiology received. The researchers were honored for their work in the field of “genetic regulation of organ development and programmed cell death ”.

Life

Sydney Brenner was born the son of Jewish emigrants in Germiston. His father was from Lithuania (then Russian Empire ) in 1910 and his mother had emigrated to South Africa from Latvia in 1922 . The father, who could not read and write, but had learned five languages ​​in the course of his life ( Yiddish , Russian , English , Afrikaans and isiZulu ), ran a small shoemaker's workshop. A customer noticed his son Sydney and persuaded his father to send him to her kindergarten, where he soon proved to be gifted and later did very well at school, so that he could skip several school classes. In December 1941, when he was only 15, he graduated from Germiston High School . It was in the library there that he discovered his interest in the natural sciences and, with a grant from the city council of Germiston, he began studying medicine and natural sciences at the Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg in 1942 . In 1951 he graduated with an MB BCh . In the meantime he had made up his mind to become a researcher and not a general practitioner and, on the advice of his academic mentors, applied to Cyril Norman Hinshelwood , Professor of Physical Chemistry at Oxford University , who was interested in the application of physico-chemical principles in the field of developing cell biology. Hinshelwood accepted Brenner as a PhD student and he received his PhD from Exeter College, Oxford University in Great Britain in 1954 .

After a short time in a chemical laboratory, he moved to the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge / England in 1956 . There he devoted himself to molecular biology and, from 1957, mainly to research into genetic material (DNA), and in 1979 he also became head of the relevant department. Seven years later, he became director of the institute's molecular genetic department, which he headed until 1991. From 1996 to 2000 he was President and Director of Science at the Salk Institute La Jolla and the Molecular Sciences Institute in Berkeley, California, which he founded .

From 2005 to 2011 he was president of the "Promotion Corporation" of the Japanese Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST); He played an important role in founding the OIST, a graduate university.

Until his death he worked at the Salk Institute, the Janelia Research Campus and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute .

Brenner established the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans as a model organism and studied its organ development and the development of the nervous system . With the help of C. elegans , the first genes that play an important role in apoptosis were described. He had already contributed to the elucidation of the genetic code in the 1960s when he and colleagues discovered the frameshift mutations .

Brenner initiated the first gene sequencing of a cephalopod ( Octopus bimaculoides ), which was completed in 2015.

Awards and memberships

literature

Web links

Commons : Sydney Brenner  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Chang Ai-Lien: Nobel laureate Sydney Brenner, who helped place Singapore on biotech world stage, dies at 92. In: The Straits Times . April 5, 2019, accessed April 5, 2019 .
  2. ^ Sydney Brenner Biographical. Nobel Prize Foundation, accessed April 5, 2019 .
  3. ^ Gisela Baumgart: Brenner, Sydney. In: Werner E. Gerabek , Bernhard D. Haage, Gundolf Keil , Wolfgang Wegner (eds.): Enzyklopädie Medizingeschichte. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2005, ISBN 3-11-015714-4 , p. 208.
  4. ↑ Dr. Sydney Brenner, Former OIST Promotion Corporation President, Receives Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun. Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University date = 2017-08-22, accessed April 5, 2019 .
  5. ↑ Caroline B. Albertin, Oleg Simakov, Therese Mitros, Z. Yan Wang, Judit R. Pungor, Eric Edsinger-Gonzales, Sydney Brenner, Clifton W. Ragsdale, Daniel S. Rokhsar: The octopus genome and the evolution of cephalopod neural and morphological novelties . In: Nature . tape 524 , no. 7564 , August 13, 2015, p. 220–224 , doi : 10.1038 / nature14668 ( nature.com [PDF]).
  6. ↑ Member entry by Prof. Dr. Sydney Brenner (with picture and CV) at the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina , accessed on July 3, 2016.
  7. ↑ Member History: Sydney Brenner. American Philosophical Society, accessed May 19, 2018 (with a short biography).
personal data
SURNAME Brenner, Sydney
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British biologist and Nobel Prize winner
DATE OF BIRTH January 13, 1927
PLACE OF BIRTH Germiston , South African Union
DATE OF DEATH 5th April 2019
Place of death Singapore