Director, Molecular Sciences Institute
2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
1978/1991 Gairdner International Award Winner

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 was 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.