A Conversation with Sydney Brenner

Dr. Sydney Brenner, Senior Distinguished Fellow of the Crick-Jacobs Center at the Salk Institute, talks about his life and career with Dr. Aravinda Chakravarti, Director of the Center for Complex Disease Research at the McKusick-Nathans Institute of Genetic Medicine, part of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and co-Editor of the Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics. Dr. Brenner recounts his early life in South Africa, and how he became interested in molecular biology, came to work with Francis Crick at Cambridge University, proposed the existence of messenger RNA, and studied Caenorhabditis elegans as a model of neural development. The latter earned him the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine.