Sir John Sulston, one of the architects of the Human Genome Project, has been awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine.
He shares the honour with South African-born Sydney Brenner and American Robert Horvitz for their discoveries concerning genetic regulation of organ development and programmed cell death. Their work in the 1960s and 1970s - which has had such an enormous impact on biological and medical advances - was done with the tiny nematode worm C.elegans.
As director of the Sanger centre in Cambridge, which carried out a third of the vast gene sequencing work for the Human Genome Project, Sir John fought hard to ensure the information was made publicly available. Results were published on the internet every day, as data became available, and he found himself in a high profile race with the American entrepreneur Craig Venter, who sought to patent his discoveries. The Sanger centre and its US publicly funded counterparts began to distribute free, open-code software so that scientists all over the world could start combing through the sequence looking for genes and ways to exploit the masses of information the project had created.
The race was declared a draw last year, when the human genome sequence of 3 billion "letters" was published to great acclaim, but his stand ensured that most of the information is freely available to scientists around the world, fuelling the gathering speed of research into areas such as cancer and cloning.
Last year, Sir John stepped down as director of the centre, which is funded by the Wellcome Trust, and his book, the Coomon Thread, described what he called the "mad politics" of genetic research. He said: "The genome is a hieroglyph and all we have done is dig it up and brush the sand off. We still have to understand most of it."
Sir John carried on the work of Sydney Brenner, now based at the University of California at Berkeley, on the nematode worm, C.elegans , which have just 959 cells and 100 million bases in its genetic code.
He developed techniques to study all cell divisions in the nematode, from the fertilised egg to the 959 cells in the adult organism. In a publication from 1976, Sir John described the cell lineage for a part of the developing nervous system.
"He showed that the cell lineage is invariant, ie every nematode underwent exactly the same program of cell division and differentiation," noted the Nobel committee in today's citation.
"As a result of these findings, Sulston made the seminal discovery that specific cells in the cell lineage always die through programmed cell death and that this could be monitored in the living organism. He described the visible steps in the cellular death process and demonstrated the first mutations of genes participating in programmed cell death," it added.
Commenting on the Nobel awards, Lord May of Oxford, the president of the Royal Society, said: "The work and leadership of John Sulston and Sydney Brenner, who are both fellows of the Royal Society, has ensured that the UK has maintained its position at the forefront of the revolution in molecular biology over the past several decades. They have been very influential in moulding and developing future generations of responsible and skillful scientists who will lead us into the post-genome era."