The Society notes with regret the death of Honorary Member Sydney Brenner CH FRS, a Nobel Prize winner in 2002 for the discoveries concerning genetic regulation of organ development and programmed cell death. Born in South Africa and trained initially as medical student, he worked with Francis Crick for over 20 years to establish the basis of the genetic triplet code and its transcription. He also established the nematode worm C. elegans as a novel experimental model organism. Brenner’s discoveries, carried out in Cambridge, UK, led to the first fully mapped genome of a multi-cellular animal, published in 1998. He was responsible for many of the key modern initiatives in molecular biology, including the founding of The European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg in 1974. (Photo credit: Sydney Brenner speaking at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, December 2008).