Order of Mapungubwe in Gold
For his exceptional contribution in the field of medicine and for putting South Africa on the world stage.
Sydney Brenner was born on 13 January 1927 in Germiston. Brenner went to Germiston High School where he matriculated in 1941.
Having developed an interest in Chemistry while still at school, Brenner gradually accumulated enough test tubes and other glassware to do chemical experiments at home, using small quantities of chemicals purchased from a chemist. He soon graduated to biochemistry and tried to discover what gave flowers their distinctive colours, making his first discovery in his home-made laboratory that the pigments he extracted changed colour when the pH of the solution was changed.
Brenner went to the University of the Witwatersrand to study medicine, graduating with the degree of MB BCh in 1951. He spent two more years doing an Honours degree and an M.Sc. in the field of Cytogenetics - a subject which he essentially taught himself - and which was the beginning of his research in the field of Genetics. Thereafter he went to Oxford to do a PhD in Physical Chemistry.
Brenner's scientific bibliography began well before he had his first degree. In 1945 he co-authored a scientific paper with two others. His first paper as sole author appeared in 1946.
On his return from Oxford he set up a laboratory in the Department of Physiology in the Medical School in South Africa and set himself the task of developing a bacteriophage system which could be used to solve the genetic code. He continued to work on theoretical aspects of the genetic code and during this period was able to prove the impossibility of all overlapping triplet codes, a discovery which was circulated in the prestigious journal of the RNA Tie Club and later communicated to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
In December 1956 Brenner was offered work at the esteemed Cavendish Unit in the United Kingdom where he continued his work on molecular genetics, initiating groundbreaking research into the genetic make-up of the C. elegans there. He became director of its successor, the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, in 1977. In 1995, he founded the Molecular Sciences Institute set up with funds from the industry. Brenner retired from the Institute in 2000 and in 2001 was appointed a Distinguished Professor in the Salk Institute in La Jolla, USA.
Sydney Brenner's long and distinguished career as a first-rate scientist and his innovative scientific contributions have made him one of the world's leaders in scientific research.
