Sydney Brenner was born in South Africa (13 January 1927) and educated at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (Medicine and Science). He went to Oxford and received a degree of D.Phil., in 1952 working in the Physical Chemistry Laboratory. After a brief return to South Africa he joined the MRC Unit in the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge in 1956. He worked in it and its successor, the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge where he ws the Director from 1979 to 1987. In 1987 he became Director of the MRC Unit of Molecular Genetics retiring in 1992 from the MRC. He is now the Director of the Molecular Sciences Institute, a private research institute in Berkeley, California.

His early research was in molecular genetics, working with bacterophages and bacteria; he discovered messenger RNA (with Jacob and Meselson) and, with Francis Crick, showed that the code was composed of triplets.

In the sixties, he changed directions and initiated his research on C. elegans establishing it as a powerful experimental system for the analysis of complex biological process. As a geneticist, he saw that the techniques of cloning and sequencing would open up new ways of approaching genetics and he turned to studying vertebrate genomics and has established the pufferfish genome as a powerful tool in genome analysis.

A recent (1/2001) update:

Most people, if they're lucky, get to retire once. Sydney Brenner, a giant in molecular biology, has just begun his second retirement, and now it looks like he'll have a shot at a third. Mr. Brenner, who turns 74 this month, has stepped down as president and director of science at the Molecular Sciences Institute in Berkeley, Calif. -- a job he came out of retirement to take in 1996. But he couldn't resist accepting an offer to become a distinguished research professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, partly because it, like Mr. Brenner's home, is in La Jolla, Calif. "It is very good to have young people to talk to and listen to," says Mr. Brenner, adding that the interaction at the Salk Institute will do him good while he focuses on writing a book about the next step in research on the human genome. The book is to be published later this year by Princeton University Press. Mr. Brenner, who was born in South Africa, spent the bulk of his 50-year career in Cambridge, England, where he directed the Laboratory of Molecular Biology. He retired in 1992 -- and then was lured to Berkeley. But the Molecular Sciences Institute's endowment runs out in July, and Mr. Brenner says he didn't want to have to raise more money to keep it going. "I don't want to be the head of a large organization and just push paper and people every day," he says. But he adds: "I don't want to retire to play golf. Science is one's hobby and one's work and one's pleasure." Mr. Brenner is best known for his work in the 1960's, which established the existence of messenger RNA, which transmits information from DNA to proteins. That discovery won him the prestigious Lasker Award in 1971 for basic medical research. More recently, he has been part of a team studying vertebrate genome evolution using the Japanese puffer fish. Mr. Brenner won a second Lasker award last fall for work in medical sciences, honoring his achievements over a lifetime. "The first one was for science," Mr. Brenner cracks, "the next one was for surviving."