1. Sydney Brenner by Andrew Brenner

2. Early Life  Sydney Brenner was born in 1927 in Germinston, South Africa  He discovered the Germinston Public Library (funded by Carnegie) which inspired his thirst for knowledge  By the age of 15, Sydney was attending university in Johannesburg to study medicine  By 1942, Sydney was studying physics, chemistry, and botany

3. Career  Sydney remained in South Africa until he received his masters in science  By 1952, Sydney had attended Oxford to work on his PhD in a physical chemistry laboratory  In April 1953, Sydney visited Cambridge to view the proposed model of DNA Watson and Crick had developed

4. Career  After finishing his PhD, Sydney had returned to South Africa to open up his own research lab  The lab was part of the Physiology Dept. at South Africa Medial School  He had opened up this lab to extend the field of molecular biology  Research at the lab included developing a bacteriophage system to elucidate the genetic code  In 1956, he left to England to continue researching with Crick

5. Career  In 1961, the Crick, Brenner et al. experiment was performed  This experiment elucidated the triplet codon system for correspondence to amino acids  The experiment also made the existence of frame-shift mutations apparent  The experiment was performed using T4 bacteriophages.

6. Career  As Max Perutz was retiring in 1979, Sydney was appointed Director of the MRC lab as a successor  During his time as Director, he became interested in DNA sequencing  Became an active proponent in the early stages of the Human Genome Project  In 1986, he took the opportunity to leave his Director’s position to continue doing research

7. Nobel Prize  Sydney began focusing on using C. elegans as a model organism for research involving animal and specifically neural development in the early 2000s  He chose this worm as a model organism because it is simple to study, easy to grow, and convenient for genetic analysis  In 2002, he won the Nobel Prize for his research on C. elegans with which he shared with H. Robert Horvitz and John Sulston

8. The End

9. Sources http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/l aureates/2002/brenner-autobio.html http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biograp hy/Sydney_Brenner.html http://www.salk.edu/faculty/brenner.html