Program

Organizers: Philip Goelet, Barbara Meyer, Jonathan Hodgkin, Mila Pollock & Daniel Rokhsar

Bruce Stillman

Welcome Remarks

Session 1: A Lifetime of Discovery

Chair: Terry Sejnowski

Salk Institute, La Jolla, CA

Matthew Cobb

Sydney’s scientific style—The early game

Bruce Alberts

Why Sydney was such an inspiration—Some memories

Session 2: Everything Fell into Place and My Future Scientific Life Was Decided Then and There

Chair: Thoru Pederson

University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester

G. Steven Martin

Sydney and temperature-sensitive mutants—My future scientific life was decided then and there

Anthony O. Stretton

My life with Sydney, 1961 - 1971

Session 3: Sydney Let Out a Yelp . . . He Had Seen the Answer

Chair: Matt Meselson

Harvard University, Cambridge, MA

Tom Blumenthal

Trans-splicing and the discovery of operons in eukaryotes

Gary Ruvkun

N-glycosylated asparagine to aspartic acid editing of host and viral proteins by NGLY1 deglycosylation

Gene Yeo

Comparative RNA genomics to RNA therapeutics

James E. Darnell, Jr.

My friend Sydney

Session 4: I Would Like to Tame a Small Metazoan Organism to Study Development Directly (C. elegans I)

Chair: Jonathan Hodgkin

University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

David Hirsh

Recollections of Sydney and the UGA suppressor

John White

Expanding the mind of a worm

Judith Kimble

Genes, lineages and beyond

Robert H. Waterston

Transcriptome profiling with lineage and single cell resolution in Caenorhabditis

Session 5: Nature's Gift to Science (C. elegans II)

Chair: Barbara Meyer

HHMI / University of California, Berkeley

Cynthia J. Kenyon

Genes that control the rate of aging

Susan E. Mango

Chromosome organization in 4D

Ikue Mori

Interdisciplinary approaches toward revealing principles of information processing underlying animal behavior using C. elegans as a model

Session 6: Behavior is the Result of a Complex Ill-understood Set of Computations Performed by Nervous Systems

Chair: Gerald M. Rubin

Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Ashburn, Virginia

Martin Chalfie

A sluggish start to neurogenetics

Oliver Hobert

How Sydney’s quest for behavioral mutants taught us lessons about neuronal cell type specification

Scott W. Emmons

Inspired for a lifetime by Sydney Brenner

Session 7: POSTERS and EXHIBIT

Christopher M. Hammell

lin-4 functions as a temporal morphogen

Gal Haspel

Shrinkers move backward like wild type and wild type animals shrink—GABA inhibition is for speed

Andrea Scharf

wormEco—A laboratory ecosystem and simulation to study the interface of individual life history traits and population dynamics

Antoinette Sutto

Brenner as a commentator on biotechnology, from Cambridge to the courtroom

Bill Wood

Rime of the Ancient Worm Picker

Session 8: Personal Reminiscences (by invitation)

Chair: Ludmila Pollock

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, NY

Michael Hayden

Sydney: The epitome of anti-arrogance, humour and inspiration

Antonio Coutinho

Institutional building on Brenner’s advice

Richard J. Roberts

Some memories of Sydney

Conrad P. Lichtenstein

From jumping genes to vegetal bestiality to DNA bar-coding and back to Hershey heaven

Balázs Gulyás

From Germiston to the Lion City

Ahna R. Skop

The science and art of C. elegans—Sydney’s insight leads to a community who celebrates the beauty of discovery

Tim Hunt

In the shade of Sydney Brenner

Daniela Rhodes

Sydney Brenner—Enfant terrible and genius

Roger Brent

Brenner and the Molecular Sciences Institute

Session 9: Vertebrates, Invertebrates, and Pervertebrates

Semir Zeki

Sydney Brenner's transformative advice

Chair: Anne Villeneuve

Stanford University, CA

Arantza Barrios

Sex and plasticity

Sophie Jarriault

Core mechanisms an dynamics of natural direct reprogramming

Cori Bargmann

What made the C. elegans field successful?

Session 10: Genomes Tell us About the Past

Chair: Byrappa Venkatesh

Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology, Singapore

Richard Durbin

1000 (and more) genomes

Carina F. Mugal

The evolution of nucleotide composition in avian genomes

Caroline Albertin

HOX genes and the cephalopod body plan

Daniel Rokhsar

Genome tectonics—A chromosomal perspective on animal evolution

Session 11: We could go directly to Humans, Where we Already Have Large Numbers of Diverse Genomes, with Skilled and Expensively Trained Phenotypers, Called Doctors, Studying Them

Chair: Keith Peters

University of Cambridge, UK

Samuel J. Aparicio

From Fugu to Cancer, genome structure in evolution and cancer

Donna G. Albertson

My tongue hurts

Jonathan Karn

Seeing is believing—Visualizing the cell biology of HIV latency Living most of the time in a world created mostly in one's head, does not make for an easy passage in the real world. - SB

Seng Gee Lim

Seeing is believing—Visualizing the cell biology of HIV latency Living most of the time in a world created mostly in one's head, does not make for an easy passage in the real world. - SB

Session 12: My skills are in Getting Things Started

Chair: Philip Goelet

Red Abbey LLC, Baltimore, Maryland

Michèle Ramsay

Sydney Brenner Charitable Trust and Sydney Brenner Institute for Molecular Bioscience at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, collaborate on a fellowship program for African scholars

Sam Eletr

Sydney Brenner and DNA sequencing

Rafael Yuste

Breaking the neural code of a cnidarian—Another mischief from Sydney

Robert Baughman

The vision of OIST in Okinawa

Shawn Hoon

Evenings with Sydney