He attended Upper Canada College in Toronto, Ontario, and then went to the University of Virginia to study physics.
From 1951 to 1971, he was a staff member at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, Department of Terrestrial Magnetism.
While there he attended the phage course at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and started working on the processes by which genetic information becomes expressed as proteins.
This work was conducted with colleagues Bill H. Hoyer, Brian J. McCarthy, Ellis T. Bolton, Richard B. Roberts, David Kohne, and others.
Shortly thereafter, a theoretical paper with Eric Davidson laid some of the important groundwork for our modern understanding of the regulation of gene expression.
[7] Britten then moved to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where he remained for the rest of his career.