Sydney Brenner passed away, the Nobel Prize for Medicine who revolutionized science with a worm

Brenner revolutionized the scientific world with his theories on the genetic regulation of cell death and development. His investigations consisted of try to understand how others come from a single cell.

His works had an inseparable companion: Caenorhabditis elegans, a nematode worm, barely 1 millimeter long with just over 900 cells and 300 neurons.

Born into a poor family of Jewish immigrants, Brenner was born January 13, 1927. In his biography, he stated that he was a client of his father – a Lithuanian shoemaker who could not write but he spoke five languages, including Zulu – which had given him his first opportunity and had him accepted free at his kindergarten. Brenner was only four years old.

As a teenager, he was in the library of his city, Germiston, where he found "the source of knowledge", According to the scientist himself, he told in the autobiography published on the page of the Nobel Foundation.

He was only 15 years old when he won a scholarship to enter the faculty of medicine. Brenner was then a brilliant student who quickly obtained the necessary funding to pursue his Ph.D. at the University of Oxford in the UK, then to Cambridge, where he joined the team of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology. .

His work with the worms helped him understand the mechanism of DNA and especially the role played by RNA in the body (ribonucleic acid).

For his research, Brenner was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2002, which he shared with Bob Horvitz and John Sulston.

"I believe that a scientist must be judged on the quality of the people that he has helped produce and not on the rewards or other honors that have been awarded to him, let my work speak to them." same, "he said in his autobiography.

It's after receiving the Nobel Prize, at the age of 76, that he's declared "still pbadionate about scientific research and by the prospect of what's going on." it is possible to do in biology, science is a thing to which one is bound to life ".

His last years were spent on improving scientific development at the Agency for Science, Technology and Research which announced today his death.