2002 Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine
Authors: Inder Verma
Journal: Molecular Therapy (2002)

Sydney Brenner, Distinguished Professor at The Salk Institute in La Jolla, CA, Robert Horvitz, Professor of Biology at MIT, Cambridge, MA, and Sir John Sulston, former Director of The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Cambridge, UK, have been awarded the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for their pioneering work on “genetic regulation of organ development and programmed cell death”. For the third time in the last seven years the Nobel Committee has chosen to award the prize in Physiology and Medicine to work done in model organisms. In 1995, Ed Lewis, Christiane Nusslein-Volhard, and Eric Wieschaus were awarded the Nobel Prize for their work on genetic control of early development in Drosophila. Last year (2001), the Nobel Prize was awarded to Lee Hartwell, Tim Hunt and Paul Nurse for their work on regulation of cell cycle in yeast. Choosing a model system to understand complex biological mechanisms appears to pay off! In the mid-1960′s Sydney Brenner decided to study a more complex biological system after making marvelous contributions in molecular biology, which included the principle of co-linearity of the gene and the discovery of messenger RNA. The organism he chose was Caenorhabditis elegans, a round-worm, which had the virtue of eating E. coli as food, reproducing in three days, and living a mere three weeks. It takes vision, intuition, and deep biological understanding to choose an appropriate organism to study important biological questions. John Sulston, fresh from a postdoctoral stint in Leslie Orgel's laboratory at The Salk Institute joined Sydney at the Mecca of molecular biology, the MRC laboratory in Cambridge, UK. John Sulston painstakingly teased apart C. elegans to identify the number of cells, their lineages, and fate maps—all by sitting over a microscope for days on end without publishing for five years. This would have surely doomed him in our current granting system, but luckily the MRC laboratory had enough clout—and faith—in John Sulston to offer him a permanent position. Leslie Orgel told me the other day at lunch, “John Sulston is the best experimentalist I have ever met—he can overcome any experimental obstacle.” In 1974, Robert Horvitz, fresh from a Ph.D. in biology at Harvard with Jim Watson and Walter Gilbert joined the worm laboratory in Cambridge and contributed to the study of post-embryonic lineages. In 1977, Bob Horvitz joined the Department of Biology at MIT, where he went on to identify the CED-3 gene, involved in programmed cell death during worm development. Remarkably, CED-3 turned out to be the homologue of the mammalian Bcl2 gene. Clearly genes involved in programmed cell death, also referred to as apoptosis, are central to development, cell growth, cancer, and neurodegenerative diseases. One of the most exciting lessons in biology since the advent of recombinant DNA is the revelation of the marvelous conservation of the basic genetic apparatus during evolution. The Brenner laboratory in Cambridge attracted incredibly talented young post-doctoral fellows like Gerry Rubin, David Hirsch, Judith Kimble, Bob Waterston, Marty Chalfie, and Jonathon Hodgkin, to name a few superstars. Sydney Brenner is well known to the scientific community not only for his vision, but also his biting wit. Although he is a Distinguished Professor at The Salk Institute, he prefers to refer to himself as the “Extinguished Professor.” At a ceremony honoring and celebrating Sydney's Nobel Prize, he retold to the audience what his wife told him about a lady in a shop who said to her “Someone with the same name as your husband appears to have gotten the Nobel Prize!” Sydney emphasized to his young audience that the choice of biological system to study should be a careful one, because it can be very rewarding.