Other scientists used their expertise in imaging or computation to pave the way for future experiments. Rex Kerr, a fellow at Janelia Farm, pointed out "there is no easy way to precisely monitor the activity of neurons, or to quantify behavior at the same time." To help solve this problem, Kerr is working with a new microscope that could provide three-dimensional views—even movies—of what goes on inside the worm's head, where half of the animal's 302 neurons are located.

Brenner seemed thrilled by what he heard. "People are modeling all parts of the nervous system," he says. "This has exceeded all expectations. ... It will be seen as a turning point in our understanding of the nervous system.

"If we can simulate a behavior with a computer model of the nervous system," he adds, "then we have the capacity to predict how [the animal] will behave under circumstances that have not yet been tested. And if we can check it by experiment, then we have the basis for explaining the nervous system."

Brenner himself has influenced these and other results, directly or indirectly, and his insights and advice continue to be sought the world over. He and his wife have a house in Ely, England, a small town near Cambridge renowned for its cathedral, but they live there only a few months a year. In the winter they move to the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, where he collaborates with HHMI investigator Terrence J. Sejnowski at the Crick-Jacobs Center for Theoretical and Computational Biology.

He travels frequently to Singapore, where he says he's "been helping to build a new biomedical research program that now has several thousand people and is going very well." While in Singapore, he guides the program, gives lectures, supervises students, and even runs some research projects. A decade ago Brenner started a study of fugu, a pufferfish that he chose because it is a vertebrate with a tiny genome. The Singapore team played a big role in the international consortium that sequenced and published the fugu genome in 2002. Last October, Brenner received Singapore's top science award, the National Science and Technology Medal, and an orchid there has been named after him.

In addition, Brenner heads a planned Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan. He works with the Molecular Sciences Institute in Berkeley, California, which he founded a decade ago, and holds a variety of other positions, some of which, he says, "are secret."

Gerald M. Rubin, director of Janelia Farm, recruited Brenner during the earliest planning stages of the research campus. Rubin remembered the stimulating environment he had found at the Medical Research Council in Cambridge where he did his graduate studies with Brenner, beginning in 1971, and he wanted to reproduce some of its best features at Janelia—in particular, having people like Brenner to talk to.

"I could hardly think of a single person who could do more for the intellectual environment," says Rubin. Just consider some of Brenner's early work. He was a co-discoverer of messenger RNA and he collaborated with Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of DNA's double helix, to show that the genetic code consists of nonoverlapping triplets of nucleotides, with each triplet specifying a particular amino acid. "He did work worthy of a Nobel Prize even before he got into C. elegans," says Rubin.

"And Sydney has a combination of wit and insight that is very rare. He was so entertaining when he taught at Cambridge that students would bring their nonscientist friends to his lectures just to listen to him. So for me," says Rubin, "it would be enough if Sydney just came here and sat at a table in the pub and talked to all comers, happily giving advice on people's experiments and careers."

As Brenner describes it with a smile, "My function is to be decorative, ornamental ... to talk to the young people, tell them stories, and keep the conversation going—about science, its puzzles, and its problems."

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