Sir John Edward Sulston CH FRS MAE (27 March 1942 – 6 March 2018[11][12]) was a British biologist and academic who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on the cell lineage and genome of the worm Caenorhabditis elegans in 2002 with his colleagues Sydney Brenner and Robert Horvitz at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology.

He developed an early interest in science, having fun with dissecting animals and sectioning plants to observe their structure and function.

[4] Sulston won a scholarship to Merchant Taylors' School, Northwood[5] and then to Pembroke College, Cambridge graduating in 1963 with a Bachelor of Arts[5] degree in Natural Sciences (Chemistry).

[19] His academic advisor Colin Reese[3][4] had arranged for him to work with Leslie Orgel, who would turn his scientific career onto a different pathway.

to work on the neurobiology of Caenorhabditis elegans at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB).

[1] His certificate of election reads: John Sulston is distinguished for his work on the molecular and developmental genetics of Caenorhabditis elegans.

Sulston has now turned his attention to an analysis of the genome of C. elegans and was constructing a total physical map using a novel method of analysing cloned DNA fragments.

Later, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine[31] with Sydney Brenner and Robert Horvitz, both of whom he had collaborated with at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB), for their discoveries concerning 'genetic regulation of organ development and programmed cell death'.

One of Sulston's most important contributions during his research years at the LMB was to elucidate the precise order in which cells in C. elegans divide.

[33] In 2013, Sulston was awarded the Royal Society of New Zealand's Rutherford Memorial Lecture, which he gave on the subject of population pressure.

[38][verification needed] Although brought up in a Christian family, Sulston lost his faith during his student life at Cambridge, and remained an atheist.

[41] Sulston forfeited £15,000 of the £20,000 pledged in June 2012, as Assange had entered the embassy of Ecuador to escape the jurisdiction of the English courts.