About John Sulston

Sir John Edward Sulston CH FRS MAE (27 March 1942-6 March 2018) was a British biologist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on the cell lineage and genome of the worm Caenorhabditis elegans in 2002 with his colleagues Sydney Brenner and Robert Horvitz. He was a leader in human genome research, founding director of the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridge, UK, and Chair of the Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation at the University of Manchester. Sulston was a champion of science in the public interest, including free public access to scientific data, and opposed premature gene patenting. He and Georgina Ferry co-authored The Common Thread: A Story of Science, Politics, Ethics and the Human Genome, an encomium for open genomics. He was co-author with Robert Waterston of the Bermuda Principles for daily prepublication disclosure of human genomic sequence data, which guided the publicly funded Human Genome Project 1996-2003.

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