- Person
- Sydney Brenner
- Lived
- 1927–2019
- Field
- Molecular biology
- From
- South African-British
The story
Sydney Brenner was born in 1927 in Germiston, South Africa, the son of Jewish immigrants: a shoe repairer from Lithuania who never learned to read, and a mother from Latvia. A town bursary sent him to university at fifteen. In 1953, as a doctoral student at Oxford, he drove to Cambridge to see Francis Crick and James Watson's new model of DNA, and realised it was the key to the problems of biology. In 1956 Crick brought him to the Medical Research Council unit in Cambridge, where the two shared an office for twenty years.
Once the structure of DNA was known, the big question was how its information is turned into proteins. Proteins are made on ribosomes, but it was unclear how the instructions got there. In 1961, working with François Jacob and Matthew Meselson, Brenner showed in bacteria infected by a virus that existing ribosomes were programmed by newly made, short-lived RNA copied from the viral DNA. This was the experimental proof of messenger RNA, the working copy of a gene that carries its message from DNA to the protein-making machinery.
The same year, with Crick and colleagues, Brenner used chemically induced mutations that shift a gene's reading frame to show that the genetic code is read in non-overlapping groups of three letters. He later helped identify the three triplets that tell the cell where a protein ends. Together these discoveries completed the basic picture of how genetic information flows from DNA through RNA to protein. In the same period he and François Jacob proposed the replicon model of how bacterial chromosomes are copied, and with R. W. Horne he introduced negative staining, a method for high-resolution electron microscopy of viruses.
Brenner went on to make the worm C. elegans a model for studying development and the nervous system, and shared the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. His work on messenger RNA remains foundational to molecular biology and medicine.
Why it matters
Messenger RNA is now central to medicine, from tests that measure which genes are active in tumours to a new generation of vaccines built on mRNA.
About Sydney Brenner
Cobbler’s son from South Africa who helped crack the genetic code, co-discovered messenger RNA and made the tiny worm C. elegans a model for studying genes, development and disease. Nobel Prize 2002.
More about Sydney Brenner
Sources
- Sydney Brenner 1927-2019 MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology
- Sydney Brenner, Biographical NobelPrize.org
- Sydney Brenner Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.