The geneticist Sydney Brenner, who made this little worm a scientific legend, dies

Sydney Brenner, a pioneering molecular biologist, died at the age of 92. Among his most remarkable achievements, he Caenorhabditis elegans nematode worm in a model system for research on human diseases in the 1960s and 1970s, which sparked a new field of research.

For this feat, he shared the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 2002 with biologists John Sulston and Robert Horvitz. Brenner chose the worm because it was more complex than other well-understood organisms, such as bacteria, while still simple enough to be studied in depth. C. elegans The PubMed search database lists more than 9,000 articles published in the last decade that include a reference to the worm.

Brenner also co-discovered messenger RNA. These intermediate molecules transmit the genetic code of a cell, inscribed in DNA, to the cellular machinery that converts messenger RNA into a protein. And, along with Francis Crick and others, he has established that the genetic code of DNA consists of a series of triplet codons, each encoding the individual amino acids that make up a particular protein.

Brenner, born in South Africa in 1927, spent most of his career in the UK and obtained his Ph.D. at Oxford University. Later, he became director of the prestigious Molecular Biology Laboratory of the Medical Research Council in Cambridge.

In 1996, he crossed the Atlantic to found the Molecular Sciences Institute in Berkeley, California. In 2000, he became a Distinguished Research Professor at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California.

Over the last 35 years, he has maintained close ties with Singapore, where he was an honorary citizen, and has helped to strengthen his medical research capabilities. His death was announced on April 5 by the National Agency for Science and Technology of Singapore, A * STAR.

In 1964, Brenner co-founded the European Organization for Molecular Biology (EMBO) in Heidelberg, Germany, which became the academy of more than 1,300 biologists, influencing the direction of life science research on the continent. .