About John Sulston
" proprietary databases don’t work for such basic and broadly needed information as the sequence of the human genome "
- 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.
More on John Sulston:
C. elegans: THE CELL LINEAGE AND BEYOND
John Sulston's autobiographical Nobel Prize speech
https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2018/06/sulston-lecture.pdfJohn Sulston: 1942-2018 Book of celebration
An online book that has many comments about John Sulston
https://www.sanger.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/John_Sulston_celebration-1.pdfOral History on John Sulston and his impact.
The Cold Spring Harbor oral history
Gene Patenting1998 Cold Spring Harbor Genome Meeting
Public vs Private Human Genome Project
Meeting with Jim Waton
The Bermuda Triangle: The Pragmatics, Policies, and Principles for Data Sharing in the History of the Human Genome Project
A research paper that explains more about John Sulston's role in open science
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10739-018-9538-7Human Genome Project leader warns against attempts to patent genes
The Guardian story about his London speech, on why sequencing data needed to be freely available
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2010/jun/24/human-genome-project-patent-genes