Sydney Brenner (South Africa, 1927) received his early education in the University of Witwatersand, Joannesburg. He was at the University of Oxford from 1952-54 and, after a short return to South Africa, in 1957 he joined the predeccessor of what later became the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. He worked there until 1956 and was its Director from 1979 – 1956. He then founded the MRC Unit of Molecular Genetics in the Department of Medicine in Cambridge University and retired in 1992.

He has participated in the construction and re-construction of several research institutions in Europe, America and Asia. At present he holds an academic appointment as Senior Fellow with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at their Janelia Research Campus in Washington USA and is also a Senior Fellow of ASTAR in Singapore.

He was an early pioneer and a founder of Molecular Biology. In 1963 he initiated research on the small nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, for which he received the Nobel Prize in 2002.

Sydney Brenner. "The impact of Molecular Biology in the Medicine of the XXI Century"