Sir John Sulston obituary
In 2002 the biologist John Sulston, who has died of stomach cancer aged 75, shared a Nobel prize for physiology. He won it for elucidating the entire sequence in which the daughters of a single cell divide and sometimes disappear as an embryo grows into an adult in the tiny roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans. However, he is much better known for leading the British team that sequenced a third of the human genome, and for the fierce integrity with which he successfully argued that all genomic data should be openly accessible to the scientific community without commercial involvement.
Previously content to pursue his work out of the public eye, in 1998 Sulston found himself catapulted on to the front pages as the publicly funded Human Genome Project (HGP) faced competition from a rival, private genome-sequencing project launched by the American geneticist Craig Venter's Celera Genomics. Sulston took every opportunity to challenge, on both ethical and scientific grounds, a model in which access to the data would be controlled by commercial licence agreements.
Continue reading...