Sydney Brenner

Sydney Brenner talks to biologist and historian Matthew Cobb about his twenty-year collaboration with DNA pioneer Francis Crick which generated some of their most creative research. bbc

Sydney Brenner was one of the 20th Century’s greatest biologists. Born 90 years ago in South Africa to impoverished immigrant parents, Dr Brenner became a leading figure in the biological revolution that followed the discovery of the structure of DNA by Crick and Watson, using data from Rosalind Franklin, in the 1950s.

Brenner’s insights and inventive experiments laid foundation stones for new science of molecular biology and the genetic age in which we live today, from the Human Genome Project to gene editing.