Sydney Brenner, who helped decipher genetic code, dies at 92

LA JOLLA, Calif. (AP) — Sydney Brenner, a Nobel Prize-winning biologist who helped decipher the genetic code, has died. He was 92.

The Salk Institute for Biological Studies said Brenner died Friday in Singapore.

Brenner shared the Nobel Prize in medicine in 2002 for his contribution to work unraveling how genes control cell division. He and two colleagues, John Sulston and Robert Horvitz, traced a roundworm known as C. elegans to determine how cells divide and create something new.

The findings were key to understanding how cancers develop.

His most important contribution to science, however, was the work he did with Francis Crick and others to determine the genetic code. They discovered that DNA is made up of a series of three nucleotides called codons, which encode the amino acids that make up a protein.