The 2000 GSA Honors and Awards

The 2000 George W. Beadle Medal

IN the year 2000, the Genetics Society of America awarded the George W. Beadle Medal to John Edward Sulston and Robert Hugh Waterston for their outstanding contributions to the scientific community. Their collaborative work on whole-genome sequencing reflects remarkable vision, integrity, and hard work. And more importantly, their achievements have benefited innumerable scientists around the world. It is a great pleasure to recognize them with this most fitting award.

John Sulston has spent most of his career working on nucleic acids. His thesis focused on the synthesis of oligonucleotides and earned him a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the University of Cambridge, England. His postdoctoral studies, with Leslie Orgel at the Salk Institute, tackled oligonucleotide synthesis from the perspective of prebiotic chemistry. When John returned to England in 1969 as a staff scientist at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, he began to mix biology with chemistry. His early article, "The DNA of Caenorhabditis elegans" (Genetics 77: 95–104), foreshadowed the extraordinary project he began a decade later.

John Sulston has always reveled in big projects. His first was a description of the complete cell lineage of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. This enormous feat, which was completed in the early 1980s, provided a cellular database that has been essential for analyzing cell lineage controls over the past two decades. John then turned his attention back to nucleic acids and embarked on an even larger and more ambitious project—mapping and sequencing of the complete C. elegans genome.

Bob Waterston began his scientific career in the medical sciences. He obtained a Ph.D. and an M.D. from the University of Chicago in 1972, with his thesis research focusing on immunology. Bob then went to the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England, where he did postdoctoral studies with Sydney Brenner on the molecular genetics C. elegans. It was at this time that Bob first met John Sulston.

Bob Waterston joined the faculty of Washington University in 1976 and has stayed in St. Louis since. During this time, Bob has made many important contributions to our understanding of animal biology. His early work pioneered the genetics and molecular biology of major muscle genes, in particular myosin and paramyosin. Later, the scope of his research expanded into the cell biology of muscle and early embryogenesis, topics that he continues to address even now.

In the mid-80s, John Sulston and Bob Waterston joined forces to tackle the sequence of the C. elegans genome. At the time, no cellular genome, much less that of a metazoan, had been sequenced. Most scientists thought the very idea of whole-genome sequencing was crazy—overly ambitious and a waste of money. This meant that John and Bob had to meet the challenge of winning governmental support in the face of public disapproval, in addition to figuring out how to approach one of the largest scale scientific ventures ever attempted. It soon became clear that achieving this gargantuan task would require an unusually large team of scientists and considerable organization. Although neither John nor Bob had administrative ambitions, John Sulston assumed the directorship of the Sanger Centre in Hinxton, England, and Bob Waterston became director of the Genome Sequencing Center in St. Louis. Among the teams assembled at the two sites was the C. elegans Sequencing Consortium, which completed the C. elegans sequence in 1998. This remarkable achievement provided the first glimpse of a metazoan genome. Furthermore, the C. elegans genome became inextricably linked with projects to sequence the genomes of other organisms, and John Sulston and Bob Waterston became key players in several other genome sequencing efforts, including the human genome project.

John Sulston and Bob Waterston deserve our most profound respect and admiration—not only because they broke through scientific and political barriers to sequence the first metazoan genome, but also because of their commitment to the scientific community. How scientific results are communicated—when, where and to whom—is a matter of continuous debate. These decisions can retard or accelerate scientific progress. In addition, those decisions make a major impact on how it feels to do science. From the very start, John and Bob insisted that all their data be shared and open for everyone—not only in the C. elegans community, but in the larger scientific community as well. Indeed, a major underlying principle of the project was to make data and reagents publicly available, sometimes years before either was published. This all-embracing spirit of community has, at least in part, spread beyond the C. elegans field to the genome projects of other organisms, which is a terrific legacy for these two inspiring men.

View larger version (134K): In this window In a new window Download PPT slide   Bob Waterston (left) and John Sulston. Photo by Eric Green.