Sydney Brenner, a molecular biologist and geneticist whose accomplishments include the discovery of mRNA, the sequences for STOP codons during protein translation, and a Nobel Prize in 2002 for his basic genetic and developmental explorations of what is now one of the most popular model organisms, C. elegans, died April 5. He was 92 years old.
“Collaborating with Sydney not only made all the difference to my ideas and my few experiments but it was all such fun,” wrote Francis Crick, the codiscoverer of DNA who shared an office with Brenner at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in the UK, in a tribute to Brenner in The Scientist in 2002. “[H]is great strength was in experiments, and in particular the choice and execution of ones that were both important and ingenious.”
The son of a cobbler, Brenner was born and raised in South Africa. He attended the University ...
