Sydney Brenner
Today we had Dr.Sydney Brenner a Nobel prize winner in Physiology or Medicine visiting our Company(Philips Healthcare)..It was a great pleasure to meet a Noble Prize winner in my Lifetime :)
Brenner was born in a small town, Germiston (South Africa). His
parents were Jewish immigrants. His father came to South Africa from Lithuania in 1910, and his mother, from Riga, Latvia, in 1922.[1] Educated at Germiston High School and the University of the Witwatersrand, he went on to complete a D.Phil. from Exeter College, Oxford.
Together with Jack Dunitz, Dorothy Hodgkin, Leslie Orgel, and
Beryl Oughton he was one of the first people in 1953 to see the model of the structure of DNA, constructed by Francis Crick and James Watson; at the time he and the other scientists were working at
Oxford University's Chemistry Department. All were impressed by
the new DNA model, especially Brenner who subsequently worked with Crick at Cambridge.
Brenner made several seminal contributions to the emerging fie
ld of molecular biology in the 1960s. These include the identification of messenger RNA, and in the elucidat
ion of the triplet nature of the code of protein translation through the Crick, Brenner et al. experiment of 1961, which discovered frameshift mutations. This insigh
t provided early elucidation of the nature of the genetic code. Brenner then focused on establishing Caenorhabditis elegans as a model organism for the investigation of animal development including neural development. Brenner chose this 1 millimeter-long soil roundworm mainly because it is simple, is easy to grow in bulk populations, and turned out be quite convenient for genetic analysis. The title of his Nobel lecture on
December 2002, "Nature's Gift to Science" is a homage to this modest nematode, and he considered that having chos
en the right organism turned out to be as important as having addressed the right problems to work on.[2] For the latter work he shared the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with H. Robert Horvitz and John Sulston. In recognition of his pioneering role in starting what is now a global research community that work on C. elegans, another closel
y related nematode was given the scientific name Caenorhabditis bren
Brenner founded the Molecular Sciences Institute and is currently associated with the Salk Institute, the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology, the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, and the Janelia Farm Research Campus, Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He is also on the Board of Scientific Governors at The Scripps Research Institute. Known for his penetrating scientific insight and acerbic wit, Brenner for many years penned a regular column ("Loose Ends") in the journal Current Biology; he wrote "A Life In Sci
ence"
(ISBN 0-9540278-0-9) paperback published by Biomed Central Ltd. in 2001.
Brenner was awarded the National Science and Technology Medal by A*STAR, Sing
apore on 11 October 2006 for his distinguished and strategic contributio
ns to the development of Singapore’s scientific capability and culture, particu
l
arly in the biomedical sciences sector.Few Pics..
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