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In October 2017, Nobel laureate Sydney Brenner (Physiology or Medicine, 2002) gave four lectures on the history of Molecular Biology, its impact on Neuroscience and the great scientific questions that lie ahead.
Sydney Brenner has been at the centre of the development of molecular biology, being a key player in shaping the Laboratory for Molecular Biology in Cambridge into a cradle of research, where pioneering and seminal discoveries in the field for over half a century have resulted in more than half a dozen Nobel Prizes.
His memory is a treasure trove of the history of the field with innumerable anecdotes on other leading scientists in the past 60 years. These lectures trace the history and recount some of those anecdotes. His interlocutor Terry Sejnowski is the Francis Crick professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the Laboratory Head of its Computational Neurobiology Laboratory. Terry and Sydney are long-term collaborators and they share many stories and memories.
The recorded lectures are the basis for this book. It aims to preserve the history of molecular biology and to also raise scientific questions that have resulted from the work of Sydney, Terry and others. It should be read by everybody who is interested in the generation, history and impact of great ideas as recounted by one of the legends of 20th century science.
Published in collaboration with Institute Para Limes.
Sample Chapter(s)Introduction
Sydney Brenner’s Lectures: Day 1, 26 October 2017
Readership: All students and researchers in molecular biology and related areas.
Dr Sydney Brenner is currently Scientific Advisor to the Chairman of A*STAR. He is also Head of the Molecular Engineering Laboratory (MEL) and a Senior Fellow at A*STAR.
Dr Brenner received his education in South Africa where he graduated in Biological Sciences and Medicine. He received his D. Phil in Physical Chemistry from Oxford University in 1954, and then went to the US as a Carnegie Corporation Fellow, working at Cold Spring Harbor and the University of California in Berkeley before returning to South Africa. An earlier meeting with Francis Crick and James Watson in Cambridge in 1953, led to his return to England from South Africa in 1957. He then joined the Medical Research Council (MRC) Unit in the Cavendish Laboratory, the predecessor of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB). He served as Director of LMB from 1975 to 1986, when he left to found the MRC Molecular Genetics Unit in the University of Cambridge's Department of Medicine and was its Director until 1992 when he retired.
His early research was in molecular genetics working with bacteriophages of bacteria. He is known for his breakthrough work in the 1960s; he discovered messenger RNA (with Francois Jacob and Matthew Meselson), and with Francis Crick showed that the code was composed of triplets. His major work was to introduce the nematode, Caenorhabditis elegans, as a model organism for the study of development and the structure and function of a small nervous system. He initiated research on the compact genome of the puffer fish and led the team in Singapore, which published the draft sequence of the genome. Because of growing interest in large genome sequences, he was the first, together with Sam Eletr, to invent new methods of large scale DNA sequencing. His main research today is on evolution studied by genome sequencing.
Dr Brenner has been associated with Singapore's Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology (IMCB) since its very beginning and has seen it grow into the world-class institution it has become today. In 2000, he joined Mr Philip Yeo in the second phase of building scientific research and development in Singapore in A*STAR and he continues in this work today. For his contributions to the development of the life sciences in Singapore, Dr Brenner received the Distinguished Friends of Singapore Award in 2000 and was appointed an Honorary Citizen of Singapore in 2003.
Dr Brenner's research has been recognised by many awards. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society (1965), a Foreign Associate of the US National Academy (1977), External Scientific Member of the Max-Planck Society (1988), and Associe Etranger, Academie des Sciences, Paris 1992. He has received two Lasker Prizes (1971 and 2000), two Gairdner International awards (1978 and 1991), and the Nobel Prize in Physiology of Medicine (2002) with Drs H Robert Horvitz and John E Sulston. He is a Companion of Honour of the United Kingdom and was conferred in 2017 the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun by the Government of Japan, in recognition of his instrumental role in establishing the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University as an internationally reputed research facility.
Dr Sejnowski is the Francis Crick Professor at The Salk Institute for Biological Studies where he directs the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory and is the Director of the Crick-Jacobs Center for Theoretical and Computational Biology. His research in neural networks and computational neuroscience has been pioneering.
Sejnowski is also Professor of Biological Sciences and Adjunct Professor in the Departments of Neurosciences, Psychology, Cognitive Science, Computer Science and Engineering at the University of California, San Diego, where he is Co-Director of the Institute for Neural Computation. With Barbara Oakley, he co-created and taught "Learning How To Learn: Powerful Mental Tools to Help You Master Tough Subjects," the world's most popular online course, available on Coursera.
Dr Sejnowski received his PhD in physics from Princeton University. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University and the Harvard Medical School. He served on the faculty of Johns Hopkins University and was a Wiersma Visiting Professor of Neurobiology and a Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Scholar at Caltech.
Sejnowski received a Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1984 from the National Science Foundation. He received the Wright Prize from the Harvey Mudd College for excellence in interdisciplinary research in 1996 and the Hebb Prize for his contributions to learning algorithms by the International Neural Network Society in 1999. He became a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2000 and received their Neural Network Pioneer Award in 2002. In 2003 he was elected to the Johns Hopkins Society of Scholars. He is a Senior Fellow of the Design Futures Council. He was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2008. In 2010 he was elected as a member to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), and elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2011. In 2017 he was elected to the National Academy of Inventors. This places him in a group of only three living scientists to have been elected to all four of the national academies. In 2013 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2014. He was awarded the 2015 Swartz Prize for Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience from the Society for Neuroscience. In 2017 he was received an honorary doctorate from the University of Zurich.
