Professor Sir John Sulston - personal details

Professor John Sulston is Chair of the Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation (iSEI), which was established at The University of Manchester with the mission to observe and analyse the role and responsibilities of science and innovation. The institute will examine the ways in which science is used in the 21st century, to evaluate possible or desirable changes and to consider the forms of regulation and control of the process that are appropriate or desired.

John Sulston was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 2002 jointly with Sydney Brenner and Bob Horvitz, for the work they had done in understanding the development of the nematode (worm) Caenorhabditis elegans.

For more than 20 years, John worked on the biology of C. elegans, studying particularly its cell lineage and its genome. Collaboration between his group and that of Bob Waterston in St Louis, Missouri resulted in the publication of the nematode DNA sequence in 1998.

John was the Founder Director of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Centre from 1992 to 2000, where one third of the task to sequence the human genome was completed. In 2002 he co-authored with Georgina Ferry The Common Thread, an account of the science, politics and ethics of the human genome project. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and an Honorary Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge.