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Human genome sequencer slated to lecture in Taipei

John Sulston, co-winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine, is scheduled to come to Taiwan this week for a lecture and book-launching tour, sources said yesterday.

Sulston, former director of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, who led the British team on the international Human Genome Project, is scheduled to deliver a speech titled "Society and the Human Genome" on Dec. 13 at National Taiwan University, BTCO officials said.

The Nobel laureate will also be present at a ceremony marking the launch of the Chinese version of the book The Common Thread: A Story of Science, Politics, Ethics and the Human Genome that Sulston and writer Georgina Ferry co-authored.

The human genome was successfully sequenced in one of the largest international scientific projects ever undertaken. Now, societies have to decide how that information will be used.

In The Common Thread, Sulston and Ferry argue that the desire for commercial profit must not be allowed to hamper future research or to restrict the medical benefits of genetic discoveries to the wealthy.

The Nobel Assembly awarded the 2002 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine jointly to Sydney Brenner, Robert Horvitz and John Sulston for their discoveries concerning "genetic regulation of organ development and programmed cell death."

The Nobel Assembly panel of judges said that by using the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans as a model system, the scientists had identified key genes regulating these processes, and had also shown that corresponding genes exist in higher species, including humans.

Sulston, 60, graduated from Cambridge University in 1963. After completing his doctorate on the chemical synthesis of DNA, he moved to the US to study probiotic chemistry (the origins of life on earth). In 1969, he joined Sydney Brenner's group at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology and studied the biology and genetics of the nematode worm C. elegans. He and his team collaborated with Bob Waterston at Washington University to sequence the genome of this model organism.

He has been listed among Great Britain's 100 most powerful people by the Observer newspaper. Sulston was knighted in 2001 for his contributions in the field of genome research.
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