‘Walking history’ of DNA and Nobel winner Brenner dies at 92

Nobel Prize winner Sydneet Brenner, who helped decipher the genetic code, has died at the age of 92.

Sydney Brenner lectures in Singapore in 2003. Picture: AP

Sydney Brenner, a scientist who helped decipher the genetic code, discover how its information is put to use, and laid the groundwork for DNA sequencing technology, has died.

South African-born Brenner, who was 92, died on Friday in Singapore.

He was also famed for research on a tiny worm, caenorhabditis elegans, which became a model organism for studying animal life. Many of its genes turned out to have human equivalents, leading to insights into human biology.

For the elegans research, Professor Brenner, John Sulston and Robert Horvitz shared the 2002 Nobel prize in physiology and medicine. It also earned Professor Brenner an informal title he didn’t much care for: “Father of the worm”.

His seven-decade career spanned the globe, and he was active in science until the end. He spent the last part of his life in Singapore, where he advised that country on biotechnology policy. He performed research in the UK and in San Diego, where he served the Salk Institute and Scripps Research.

“He was one of the most ­important figures in molecular biology for the last 50 years,” said genome expert Craig Venter. “There wasn’t a … breakthrough in the early days that he didn’t play some role in. He was a walking history of the whole field.”

Professor Venter said the worm research was far from his most important contribution. Professor Brenner’s work on the genetic code was fundamental. He teamed up with scientists led by Francis Crick, who with James Watson discovered the double helix structure of DNA.

Professor Brenner helped discover “messenger RNA,” the carrier molecule that copies the DNA code and carries it into the cell for protein synthesis.

The discovery of mRNA led to development of “antisense” drugs. These drugs intercept mRNA to block or alter protein production.

Later on, Professor Brenner’s discoveries became the basis for what is known as “next generation sequencing”, which offered greatly improved speed over existing technologies. It combines reading multiple copies of DNA in parallel with repeated sequencing to reduce errors. Professor Brenner joined the Salk Institute and Scripps Research in 1976.

“We at Salk join countless other scientists and researchers around the world in mourning the passing of Sydney Brenner,” Salk president Rusty Gage said.

“Along with raising the field of molecular biology to maturity, Sydney was a generous and dedicated mentor, colleague and friend. He was an inspiration to generations of scientists and he will be greatly missed.”

At Scripps Research in 1992, Professor Brenner and Richard Lerner proposed a method in molecular synthesis that employed a “bar code” tag that precisely described the steps used to create each molecule.

The method married DNA with combinatorial chemistry, a way of rapidly making many kinds of molecules in vast quantities. The DNA, added step by step in the synthesis, served as the tag. So when scientists found a rare “hit” in a molecule, they didn’t have to figure out how it was produced. That proposal was ahead of its time.

But genetic technology has matured since then, partly due to Professor Brenner’s own work on DNA sequencing. This method of making “DNA-encoded ­libraries” is now used by drug companies as a way of cataloguing the vast numbers of molecules they work with, so the rare “hits” can be easily replicated.

“Everybody uses DNA-­encoded libraries today,” Scripps colleague Kim Janda said.

“And that’s something Sydney came up with.”

DPA