Using the worm, Dr. Brenner and his colleagues first worked out methods for breaking a genome into fragments, multiplying each fragment in a colony of bacteria, and then decoding each cloned fragment with DNA sequencing machines. His colleagues John Sulston and Robert Waterston completed the worm’s genome in 1998, and they and others used the same methods to decode the human genome in 2003.
Another major project, made possible because of the worm’s transparency, was to track the lineage of all 959 cells in the adult worm’s body, starting from the single egg cell. This feat, accomplished so far for no other animal, made clear that many cells are programmatically killed during development, leading to the discovery by H. Robert Horvitz of the phenomenon of programmed cell death.
The topic assumed an importance that transcended worm biology when it emerged that programmed cell death is supposed to occur in damaged human cells, and that cancer can thwart this process.
For their work on programmed cell death, Dr. Brenner, Dr. Sulston (who died last year) and Dr. Horvitz were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2002. But many people, including Dr. Brenner himself, believed he should have been awarded a Nobel much earlier for his and Dr. Crick’s work on the genetic code.
“On more than one occasion, in fact, he has claimed that he is delighted to have been awarded two Nobel Prizes — the first he never received!” his biographer, Errol C. Friedberg, wrote.
Sydney Brenner was born to Jewish immigrants in Germiston, a small town near Johannesburg, on Jan. 13, 1927. His father, Morris, a cobbler who could not read or write, had fled Lithuania to escape conscription in the czar’s army. His mother, Leah (Blecher) Brenner, was an émigré from Latvia.
Sydney was taught to read by a neighbor. When a customer at his father’s shop learned that Sydney, at age 4, could read English fluently but that his father could not afford to send him to school, the customer paid the boy’s tuition.
