Sydney Brenner—a personal perspective

An obituary for Sydney Brenner, a pioneering molecular biologist and scientific giant who passed away on April 5, 2019 at the age of 92, is presented. Among other things, Sydney made a landmark contribution to genomics, particularly comparative genomics, whereby genomes of animals distantly related to human are compared with the human genome to identify conserved sequences that play a role in their shared phenotypes, and to highlight sequences unique to human and other lineages that potentially contribute to their derived phenotypes.