18 Deep Intelligence

Born and educated in South Africa, Sydney Brenner participated in the early days of molecular genetics at Cambridge University (figure 18.1). He shared an office at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) with Francis Crick. What do you do for your next project after discovering the structure of DNA and working out the genetic code? Francis decided to focus on the human brain, and Sydney inaugurated a new model organism, Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans), a roundworm that lives in the soil, is only 1 millimeter long, and has only 302 neurons. This nematode has served as the starting point for many breakthroughs in understanding, by following every cell in the body over time, how a creature develops from an embryo, for which Sydney shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2002 (with H. Robert Horvitz and John E. Sulston). Brenner also is famous for his wit. In his Nobel speech, he praised the worm: “The title of my lecture is ‘Nature's gift to Science.' It is not a lecture about one scientific journal paying respects to another, but about how the great diversity of the living world can both inspire and serve innovation in biological research.”
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Sydney Brenner, it would seem, was present at the Creation.