Celebrating the Life and Science of Sydney Brenner

This special Commemorative Symposium celebrates the life of the late irreplaceable and irrepressible Sydney Brenner (January 13, 1927 - April 5, 2019). Originally scheduled for April 2020, the Symposium took place at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, starting at 7 pm on Wednesday March 23, 2022 and concluding at lunchtime on Saturday March 26.

Sydney made countless indelible marks on the development of modern biology. From his long and fruitful collaboration with Francis Crick to crack the genetic code (among so much more), to his co-discovery of messenger RNA; and from his cultivation of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans into a widely-used model system, which resulted in his shared 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, to his foundational efforts in establishing the Human Genome Organization (HUGO). We are privileged to host this celebratory meeting in his honor and hope you will join us.

Meeting Topics

A lifetime of discovery (biographical overview)
Everything fell into place and my future scientific life was decided then and there
Sydney let out a yelp … he had seen the answer
I would like to tame a small metazoan organism to study development directly (C. elegans I)
Nature's gift to Science (C. elegans II)
Behaviour is the result of a complex ill-understood set of computations performed by nervous systems
Personal reminiscences (by invitation)

About the Meeting

To celebrate the life and science of the pioneering molecular geneticist Sydney Brenner (1927-2019), Ludmila Pollock of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory proposed a Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Commemorative Symposium. To assist in organizing and arranging this meeting, Mila Pollock recruited Drs. Goelet, Meyer, Hodgkin, and Rokhsar. The Symposium was originally scheduled for spring 2020, but the meeting was postponed due to the emergence of covid-19. It was ultimately held in person, with an online option, from March 23-26, 2022.

Sydney Brenner was a uniquely creative scientist whose career spanned more than six decades. He was a central figure in the founding of molecular biology in the late 1950s and 1960s, providing fundamental insights into the triplet nature of the genetic code, characterizing its punctuation, and establishing messenger RNA as an essential intermediate between the genome and the machinery of protein synthesis. In the 1960s and 1970s, Brenner’s attention shifted towards the genetics of animal complexity, and he developed, from scratch, the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans as a new model for dissecting development and behavior. This effort led not only to fundamental discoveries (see Brenner’s 2002 Nobel Prize citation) but also the establishment of an international community that has trained generations of leading researchers who have made diverse contributions to biology. In the 1980s and 1990s Brenner started the field of comparative genomics by focusing on the compact genome of the pufferfish, demonstrating the evolutionary conservation of genes and regulatory sequences between humans and fish. Brenner also made a lasting impact on science through his popular writings and lectures, his contributions to public scientific debates (including recombinant DNA), and the founding of several international research institutions that prize individual creativity and collaborative spirit, especially among young scientists., as well as several biotech enterprises. As a creative spirit, mentor, public intellectual, and all-around wit, Brenner will be missed.

The Symposium was organized into eight sessions that traced the Sydney Brenner’s interests and influences, organized in roughly chronological order, and included lecture presentations from 46/54 eminent researchers, many of whom collaborated with Brenner at some stage in their careers. The aim was to combine personal reminiscences with ongoing scientific work inspired by Brenner’s foundational work and vision. The title of each session was a quote from Brenner’s extensive autobiographical and scientific writings: “A lifetime of discovery”; “everything fell into place ...”; “Sydney let out a yelp ...”; “I would like to tame a small metazoan ...”’; “Nature’s gift to Science”; “Behavior is the result of a complex ...”; “Personal reminiscences”; “Vertebrates, invertebrates, and pervertebrates”; “Genomes tell us about the past”; “We could go directly to humans ...”; “My skills are in getting things started.”

This lively meeting was attended by approximately 115 people from a broad range of backgrounds including scientists, clinicians, historians, scholars, and science journalists. "The Life and Science of Sydney Brenner" was an exceptional success worthy of the high reputation of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Symposia. All talks are now available on the specially dedicated website at http://library.cshl.edu/Meetings/Brenner/

See the Meeting Yourself

This unique meeting celebrating Sydney Brenner's Life has been preserved and is available for your immediate viewing. PROGRAM contains session topics and links to the full length video and slides of talks presented. PROFILES contains biographies of the people in the field who presented. PARTICIPANTS lists those who attended and their institutions. PHOTOS contain hundreds of candid photos taken during the meeting.

Previous History of Science Meetings

This meeting is the tenth in a series organized by the CSHL Meeting and Courses Program together with CSHL Center for Humanities Studies of Modern Biology: Culture, History, Art, and Humanity.

We have invited speakers who made many of the seminal discoveries that began the field, as well as those who are working in the field now. We also invite historians who have examined the scientific and societal context of the field. Like the previous meetings in the series, this meeting will provide an excellent opportunity to look in depth at a topic and to share the stories that are often missing from academic accounts.

Previous meetings in the series include:

Organizers

Phillip Goelet, Red Abbey, LLC
Jonathan Hodgkin, University of Oxford, UK
Barbara Meyer, HHMI/University of California Berkeley
Mila Pollock, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Daniel Rokhsar, University of California, Berkeley

Speakers

Caroline Albertin, Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, MA
Bruce Alberts, University of California, San Francisco, CA
Donna G. Albertson, New York University College of Dentistry, Bluestone Center for Clinical Research, New York
Samuel J. Aparicio, BC Cancer Research Center, Vancouver, Canada
Cori Bargmann, The Rockefeller University, New York, New York; Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Redwood City, CA
Arantza Barrios, University College London, London, UK
Robert Baughman, Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Okinawa, Japan
Tom Blumenthal, University of Colorado, Boulder
Roger Brent, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Seattle, WA
Martin Chalfie, Columbia University, New York
Matthew Cobb, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK
Antonio Coutinho, Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciencia, Oeiras, Portugal
James E. Darnell, Jr., The Rockefeller University, New York
Richard Durbin, University of Cambridge and Wellcome Sanger Institute, Cambridge, UK
Sam Eletr, Rhythm Diagnostic Systems, San Francisco
Scott W. Emmons, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, NY
Philip Goelet, Red Abbey LLC, Baltimore, Maryland
Balázs Gulyás, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore; Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden
Christopher M. Hammell, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, NY
Gal Haspel, New Jersey Institute of Technology and Rutgers University, Newark, NJ
Michael Hayden, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
David Hirsh, Columbia University, New York
Oliver Hobert, Columbia University, HHMI, NY
Jonathan Hodgkin, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
Shawn Hoon, A*STAR, Singapore
Tim Hunt, Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Okinawa, Japan
Sophie Jarriault, IGBMC, Strasbourg, France; INSERM U1258, Strasbourg, France
Jonathan Karn, CWRU School of Medicine, Cleveland, Ohio
Cynthia J. Kenyon, Calico Life Sciences, South San Francisco, CA
Judith Kimble, HHMI / University of Wisconsin, Madison
Conrad P. Lichtenstein, Nemesis Bioscience Ltd, Cambridge, UK
Seng Gee Lim, National University Hospital, Singapore
Susan E. Mango, University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland
G. Steven Martin, University of California, Berkeley, CA
Matt Meselson, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
Barbara Meyer, HHMI / University of California, Berkeley
Ikue Mori, Nagoya University, Nagoya, Japan
Carina F. Mugal, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden
Thoru Pederson, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester
Keith Peters, University of Cambridge, UK
Ludmila Pollock, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, NY
Michèle Ramsay, Red Abbey LLC, Baltimore, Maryland
Daniela Rhodes, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, United Kingdom; Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Richard J. Roberts, New England Biolabs, Ipswich, MA
Daniel Rokhsar, University of California, Berkeley and Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Japan
Gerald M. Rubin, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Ashburn, Virginia
Gary Ruvkun, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, MA
Andrea Scharf, Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, MO
Terry Sejnowski, Salk Institute, La Jolla, CA
Ahna R. Skop, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI
Bruce Stillman, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Anthony O. Stretton, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin
Antoinette Sutto, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, NY
Byrappa Venkatesh, Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology, Singapore
Anne Villeneuve, Stanford University, CA
Robert H. Waterston, University of Washington, Seattle, WA
John White, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Bill Wood, University of Colorado, Boulder
Gene Yeo, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA
Rafael Yuste, Columbia University, New York
Semir Zeki, University College London, London, UK