British geneticist Sulston dies aged 75

LONDON: Nobel prize-winning British scientist John Sulston, a leading figure in the race to decipher the human genome, has died at the age of 75, the institute he founded said Friday.

Mike Stratton, director of the Wellcome Sanger Institute, described the professor, who died on Tuesday, as a “great scientific visionary leader”. In 2002, he was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine along with fellow Briton Sydney Brenner and H. Robert Horvitz of the US for their gene research. Using a lowly earthworm, Caenorhabditis elegans, they laid bare the mechanism by which genes regulate the programmed death of cells, a process vital to understanding cancer. But Sulston was perhaps best known for leading Britain´s contribution to the international project to map the human genome, and his insistence that the data be placed in the public domain. “His dedication to free access to scientific information was the basis of the open access movement, and helped ensure that the reference human genome sequence was published openly for benefit of humanity,” said Jeremy.