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 United States 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.
Sulston founded what was then the Sanger Centre, near Cambridge, in 1992 and was its director until 2000. It is now one of the leading centres for genome research in the world.
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