Sulston, Sir John E.

Sulston, Sir John E., born in 1942, British geneticist and cowinner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine. Sulston was awarded the prize for his discoveries concerning the genetic regulation of programmed cell death, the process in which healthy cells kill themselves as a normal part of an organism’s development. Sulston shared the prize with two former colleagues, British geneticist Sydney Brenner and American geneticist H. Robert Horvitz.

Sulston was born in Fulmer, England. He attended the University of Cambridge, earning an undergraduate degree in organic chemistry in 1963 and a doctoral degree in 1966. From 1966 to 1969 Sulston performed postgraduate research in prebiotic chemistry (the study of the origins of life on Earth) with British-born American chemist Leslie Orgel at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California.

In 1969 Sulston joined the laboratory of Sydney Brenner at the Medical Research Council (MRC) in Cambridge, England. There Sulston studied the cellular development of the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans. This tiny worm, with less than 1,000 cells, had been chosen by Brenner as an ideal experimental animal to study how genes regulate cell division, cell specialization, and organ development in multicellular animals. Sulston developed techniques that tracked each cell in the development of C. elegans as it divided and differentiated into specialized cells, such as gut, muscle, and nerve cells. During this work, Sulston found that the development of C. elegans generates 1,090 cells, yet the adult worm consists of only 959 cells. Sulston showed that certain cells undergo programmed cell death, also known as apoptosis, as part of the organism’s normal development. Sulston also identified the first mutation of a gene participating in the cell death process.

Extending Sulston’s work, Horvitz later identified genes that control programmed cell death in C. elegans and found that corresponding genes exist in humans. These discoveries shed new light on a number of human diseases that result when programmed cell death goes awry, including acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), coronary heart disease, stroke, and cancer.

From 1992 to 2000 Sulston served as the first Director of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridgeshire, England. The Sanger Institute was established to contribute to the Human Genome Project, the international scientific collaboration that identified the complete genetic blueprint of humans in 2003. As director of the institute, Sulston insisted that all scientific data produced during this publicly funded project become freely available to other researchers. While working on the human genome, Sulston and American geneticist Robert Waterston led teams that identified the complete genetic makeup of the roundworm C. elegans, the first for a multicellular organism.

In addition to the Nobel Prize, Sulston was awarded the Gairdner Foundation International Award in 1991, which he shared with Brenner, and again in 2002. Sulston was knighted in 2001. He is coauthor of The Common Thread: A Story of Science, Politics, Ethics and the Human Genome (2002).