Sydney Brenner likes travelling and drinking good wine. More than that he loves scientific research and stirring up the scientific world. In this vein he recently predicted that if human life continues on this planet as we know it, by 2020 consciousness will have disappeared as a scientific problem. The comment outraged philosophers and neuroscientists alike. Brenner is one of the past century's leading pioneers in genetics and biology. In 2002 he was awarded the Nobel prize for medicine for his contributions towards discoveries about how genes regulate organ growth and the process of programmed cell death. But he is arguably better known for the work he did in the 1950s when he discovered (with two others) messenger RNA.
Sydney Brenner - Receiving the Nobel prize in medicine from King Carl Gustaf of Sweden on December 10 2002
He is also known for the work he did in the 1960s - when he changed direction and began analysing complex biological processes. He saw that the techniques for cloning and sequencing would open up new ways of approaching genetics.
Brenner was born in Germiston in 1927, the son of Eastern European immigrants. And while his father, a cobbler, could not read or write he could speak five languages, including Afrikaans and Zulu. Brenner finished school at Germiston High, shortly before his 15th birthday. A bursary to study medicine at Wits followed and by his second year of study he was already deeply fascinated by cells and their functions. Too young to qualify as a medical doctor, he spent a further year in "academic heaven" doing BSc courses in anatomy and physiology.
One year became three as he completed his honours and then master's in cytogenetics. By then Brenner was committed to research, finishing his medical degree only because it was the right thing to do.
He left SA because he realised that to do research in these emerging fields he would have to go abroad - but he never stopped longing for the sun and warmth of his homeland. In 1952 he arrived at Oxford to do a PhD in physical chemistry, exploring various applications of physical chemistry to biology. The watershed in his scientific life came when he saw the model developed by Francis Crick and James Watson to solve the structure of DNA. "I realised this was the key to understanding all the problems in biology we had found intractable it was the birth of molecular biology," he said during his Nobel prize acceptance speech. He spent the bulk of his scientific career at Cambridge, where he directed the laboratory of Molecular Biology.
He has retired twice since then. Once in 1992, before he was lured to Berkeley in the US to be director of the Molecular Sciences Institute there. He retired again in 2002, but couldn't resist the offer to become a distinguished research professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies - partly because his home is now in La Jolla, California.
At the age of 81 Brenner is still working and was in Japan at the time of writing.
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