Nobel Laureate and Senior Fellow at King's, Sydney Brenner, died on Friday 5th April 2019, aged 92.
Born in South Africa, Sydney was appointed as a Fellow of King's in 1959 whilst he was working alongside Francis Crick at the MRC Unit for Molecular Structure of Biological Systems (later the Laboratory of Molecular Biology) in Cambridge. He was a key member of the LMB for 30 years, during which time he was at the forefront of many developments in molecular biology, including the unravelling of the genetic code, and the discovery of messenger RNA. Sydney also initiated the work on the nematode worm, Caenorhabditis elegans, to study how genes regulate organ development and how cells are programmed to die.
Sydney’s work on C.elegans was awarded the 2002 Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine, which he shared with John Sulston and Bob Horvitz. The worm is still studied worldwide today and its use has led to breakthroughs in many areas of biological research.
