Remembering Sydney Brenner

Sydney Brenner was awarded one-third of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work in discovering the genetic regulation and programmed cell death (apoptosis) in the nematode C. elegans. However, his work on gene structure and function in the two decades preceding that work may have been more significant. One of the first people to see the double helix model of Watson and Crick, he worked with Francis Crick for twenty years on describing how specific sequences of genes translate into specific amino acids and then into proteins.