Sydney Brenner: SA winner of Nobel prize
1927-2019 Book from local library set eccentric scientist on a journey of discovery
He was not well suited to the administrative job. ‘You become a mediator between two impossible groups,’ he once said, ‘the monsters above and the idiots below’
● Sydney Brenner, who was born in Germiston and won a Nobel prize in 2002, has died at the age of 92.
The prize, for physiology or medicine, was shared with John Sulston and Robert Horvitz for their study on how specific genes regulate organ growth and cell death.
Brenner was born to Jewish parents who had emigrated to SA from Europe, his mother from Latvia and his father, a cobbler, from Lithuania.
Brenner’s inspiration to pursue a scientific career came from a book in the Germiston municipal library. Too poor to buy a copy of The Science of Life, he borrowed it from the library, then said he’d lost it and paid a small fine.
The book set him on course to study medicine at Wits University. His true passion, however, was biology and he completed a master’s dissertation on the chromosomes of the small insectivore Elephantulus, so named because of its trunk-like proboscis.
Brenner moved to Britain to complete a DPhil at Exeter College, Oxford, on the workings of bacterial cells.
The work that led to the Nobel prize was a pioneering study in 1970 that shed new light on the development of diseases including Aids, neurodegenerative diseases, cancer and strokes.
The story of how the three men won the most important prize in science goes back to the 1960s when Brenner, then at the Medical Research Council’s (MRC’s) laboratories in Cambridge, had the idea of studying the millimetre-long transparent nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans to understand how genes control development from a fertilised egg. This led to the mapping of the precise lines of descent by which the 959 cells of the adult are generated from the single cell of the egg — an extraordinary achievement.
In 1979, Brenner was appointed chair of the MRC laboratory. Two days before he started, he was out on his motorcycle when he spotted a wallet in the road, which he took to the police station. Riding sedately home, he was struck by a taxi emerging from a side street. Both legs were badly broken and he subsequently required walking sticks.
He was not well suited to the administrative job. “You become a mediator between two impossible groups,” he once said, “the monsters above and the idiots below.” His template reply to invitations to meetings was: “Dear X, I regret I am unable to accept your invitation as I find I cannot attend your meeting.”
In 1996, Brenner founded the Molecular Sciences Institute in Berkeley, California. In 2005 he was appointed president of the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology.
Brenner was an entertaining mimic and storyteller. He had a passion for words and wordplay — in a riff on Avogadro’s number, he invented “Avocado’s number”, defining it as “the number of atoms in a guacamole”.
He also had an aversion to modern conveniences such as e-mail and photocopiers. He once asked a student who had a large Xerox bill whether he had tried “neuroxing” some of the papers. The student asked what he meant. Brenner replied: “It’s a very easy and cheap process. You hold the page in front of your eyes and let it go through them into the brain.”
His wife, May Balkind, an educational psychologist who married Brenner in 1952, died in 2010. He is survived by their son and two daughters. A stepson died last year.