About John Sulston
Sir John Edward Sulston was a British biologist and academic who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on the cell lineage and genome of the worm Caenorhabditis elegans in 2002 with his colleagues Sydney Brenner and Robert Horvitz at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. He was a leader in human genome research and Chair of the Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation at the University of Manchester. Sulston was in favour of science in the public interest, such as free public access of scientific information and against the patenting of genes and the privatisation of genetic technologies. Sulston won a scholarship to Merchant Taylors' School, Northwood and then to Pembroke College, Cambridge graduating in 1963 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Natural Sciences (Chemistry). He joined the Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge, after being interviewed by Alexander Todd and was awarded his PhD in 1966 for research in nucleotide chemistry. Louis, so that C. elegans became the first animal to have its complete genome sequenced. In a series of studies, culminating in a paper published in 1983, Sulston has analysed and described the total cell lineage of the nematode making it the first organism for which the origin of every cell is exactly known.
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