by Gidon Schwartz, Education & Outreach Executive
In the early days of scientific research, being a scientist was a luxury afforded only to the wealthiest of people. Charles Darwin for instance, was the child of a wealthy British doctor and financier. How else would he have had the contacts to get on board, and the financial security to set sail for 5 years, on the voyage of HMS Beagle to South America as the ship’s naturalist (after dropping out of both studying a medical degree and training to become a priest)? This trip of a lifetime, inspiring many of his ideas, formed the basis of his seminal works, ‘On the Origin of Species’ and ‘The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex’. At the other end of the scale, we have Sydney Brenner, a man who grew up with nothing and was able to change the way we see biology to such an extent that today, over 1500 research groups around the world are based on the fundamental discoveries he made.
Sydney was born in South Africa in 1927 to parents who had emigrated from Eastern Europe. His father was a cobbler who could neither read nor write, but this did not stop Sydney teaching himself to read using the newspapers the Brenner family would use as a tablecloth during dinner time. Sydney was not your average boy; he completed primary school in just four years and then graduated high school aged 15. During his time at high school, he started doing little chemistry experiments in his dad’s shed using flowers and products he found in the local pharmacy. He identified that by adjusting the acidity of a solution, he could make flowers change their colours. Not bad for a teenager!
He enrolled in medical school aged 15, and there became particularly interested in cells and how they function. This interest continued throughout his long and illustrious scientific career. Amazingly, just after starting his medical degree, he realised that he would be too young to practice as a doctor upon graduating. As a result, he had to switch to a BSc in Anatomy and Physiology. This was ultimately a very positive step for him, later recalling, “this was heaven.”
In 1946, a visiting professor from Oxford invited Brenner to go to England to work with him. Brenner had to wait before he could take up this offer as he was advised to finish medical school first as at the time, it was believed to be vital to be a medical doctor if you wanted to go into research. After graduating, he emigrated to Oxford to start his research at the University of Oxford, investigating bacterial resistance to viruses. When he arrived in Oxford, he was a real outsider. He was a scientist at a time when other subjects were seen as more worthy; he was a ‘mere’ research student and a ‘colonial’.
Whilst in Oxford, he and his friends had many discussions about the hot topic of the time – what the structure of DNA actually was. Most of his theories were far from correct, but in April 1953 the news filtered through that two scientists in Cambridge had finally cracked it – James Watson and Francis Crick. Sydney, along with fellow researchers and future Nobel Prize winners, hopped in the car and made the journey across the M40 to have a look at this famous model (N.B. they may have taken another route).
This was the watershed moment in Brenner’s academic life, and really launched the birth of his field – molecular biology. Without realising it, his previous work had catapulted him to the forefront of this emerging field.
After short stints in the United States and back in South Africa, Sydney returned to the UK to take up a position at the University of Cambridge working alongside Crick, sharing an office with him. They had one simple rule in the office – if you have an idea, however crazy you think it is, you must say it out loud. This led to the development of many new ideas – albeit not all correct in the end, but science develops from the wrong as much as the correct hypotheses.
During this time, the field of molecular biology was frowned upon by the scientific establishment so much so that undergraduate students were banned from attending his lectures as he was a subversive influence on them, and they may end up pursuing a career in molecular biology. Despite this, he was a very popular lecturer who would “mesmerise the students for over an hour.”
One of Brenner’s most ground-breaking discoveries in this period was proving that the genetic code cannot be overlapping. Meaning that when your DNA is read to create proteins, each DNA base can only code for part of one protein. This discovery led Crick to propose the molecule that we now know as tRNA. These discoveries form what is now known as the ‘central dogma’ of molecular biology.
In 1977 Brenner was appointed as Director of the Medical Research Laboratory in Cambridge, a very prestigious lab which has had 29 Nobel Prizes won for research conducted under its auspices. He spent most of his time as director sorting out the finances of the institute and as a result, at the first possible opportunity, stepped back in order to return to his true passion of research.
Later in his career, he started to study the flatworm known as Caenorhabditis elegans (or C. elegans for short). He researched the neural development and developmental biology of this species. This worm made an amazing model organism, as it has a very short generational turn over (they reproduce very quickly) and is hermaphrodite, so both sexes of worm can be studied. His work on this worm gained him the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2002, the first of four Nobel Prizes to be won by work on the C. elegans which he pioneered.
In his later life, Brenner lectured on molecular biology and its history and future all around the world, and these lectures were later adapted into a book called In the Spirit of Science: Lectures by Sydney Brenner on DNA, Worms and Brains.
Brenner’s last role was to set up a lab in Singapore where he worked until his death on 5 April 2019 aged 92.
