John Sulston - Biography

Biography

Sulston was educated at Merchant Taylors' School, Northwood and Pembroke College, Cambridge graduating in 1963. He joined the Chemistry Department in Cambridge, gained his PhD degree for research in nucleotide chemistry and devoted his scientific life to biological research, especially in the field of molecular biology. After working as a Postdoctoral researcher at the Salk Institute, USA for a while, he returned to Cambridge to work under Sydney Brenner at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology.

Sulston played a central role in both the Caenorhabditis elegans worm and human genome sequencing projects. He had argued successfully for the sequencing of C. elegans to show that large-scale genome sequencing projects were feasible. As sequencing of the worm genome proceeded, the project to sequence the human genome began. At this point he was made director of the newly established Sanger Centre (named after Fred Sanger and now the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute), located in Cambridgeshire, England.

Following completion of the 'working draft' of the human genome sequence in 2000, Sulston retired from his role as director at the Sanger Centre. In 2002 he won the Dan David Prize, directed by Professor Gad Barzilai, and the Robert Burns Humanitarian Award. Later, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Sydney Brenner and H. Robert Horvitz, both of whom he had collaborated with at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB), for their discoveries concerning 'genetic regulation of organ development and programmed cell death'. One of Sulston's most important contributions during his research years at the LMB was to elucidate the precise order in which cells in C. elegans divide. In fact, he and his team succeeded in tracing the nematode's entire embryonic cell lineage. Sulston is now a leading campaigner against the patenting of human genetic information.

Sulston is a distinguished supporter of the British Humanist Association. In 2003 he was one of 21 Nobel Laureates who signed the Humanist Manifesto.

He also provided bail sureties for Julian Assange, according to Mark Stephens, Julian's solicitor. . Having backed Julian Assange by pledging bail in December 2010, he lost the money in June 2012 when a judge ordered it to be forfeited, as Assange had sought to escape the jurisdiction of the English courts by entering the embassy of Ecuador.