John Sulston
British biologist and Nobel laureate (1942–2018)
- Fame52.3
- Momentum0.0
- United Kingdom rank#171
Source-basedStable
- Fame52.3
- Momentum0.0
- United Kingdom rank#171
- Doctors rank#239
- Wikipedia1K
Lived 1942–2018, aged 76United Kingdom
United KingdomSummary
Updated 2026-06-21
He mapped every cell division in a millimeter-long worm, then helped sequence the human genome — and spent the rest of his career arguing that no one should own the results.
Biography
About
John Sulston traced the fate of every single cell in Caenorhabditis elegans, a transparent roundworm, showing how an organism builds itself from egg to adult. The work, painstaking and precise, earned him the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine alongside Sydney Brenner and Robert Horvitz at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. He moved from worms to humans, becoming a leader in the Human Genome Project at a moment when corporations wanted to patent stretches of DNA. Sulston fought for open access — he believed genetic information belonged to everyone, not to shareholders. He chaired…
Gallery
Photos
7 images · refresh overdue
Where to find them
Platforms
By the numbers
Score breakdown
The six component signals behind the Fame score, and their ranks across the leaderboards.
Fame
Stable52.3
Composite of search demand, mentions, audience & graph footprint.
Score components
Historical22.7
Source confidence70.0
Completeness80.0
Receipts
Sources
- WikidataHigh confidencewikidata · wikidata.org
- WikipediaHigh confidencewikipedia · en.wikipedia.org
- Pantheon 2.0High confidencedatabase · pantheon.world
Discover
You might know
Similar profiles worth watching
