The first Shirley Boyde Memorial Lecture was held on Thursday, June 28, 2001 at 5:00pm By Dr Sydney Brenner entitled "Inverse Genetics".
Dr. Sydney Brenner, Founder and President of The Molecular Sciences Institute at Berkeley, California, can justly be described as one of the movers and shakers of the revolution that has overtaken Biology and Medicine - based on Molecular Biology.
Abstract: The human genome contains a very high proportion of apparent nonsense sequence. Genes are imbedded in this in an apparently random fashion and are themselves broken up into relatively short coding sequences with intervening “introns” which in some cases are many times larger than the coding sequences themselves.
The control sequences that determine whether a gene is made use of or to what extent in any particular cell or tissue, or at what stage in development, are within the so-called nonsense sequence and are largely unknown.
Dr Brenner was awarded the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.