John Sulston
British biologist and Nobel laureate (1942-2018) · United Kingdom · Scientists · Died at 75
John Sulston is read about 34 times a day, in 53 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 18 September 2026
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Something wrong?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.
A life in dates
Also in Deutsch
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Awards
About this person
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 the Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation at the University of Manchester, arguing until his death in March 2018 that science should serve the public, not the market.
In common with John
Scientists from the United Kingdom 3
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