The pioneering geneticist, Sir John Sulston, who played a pivotal role in the sequencing of the human genome, has died aged 75.
In 1992, he was appointed director of the Sanger Center, established at Cambridge to spearhead the British contribution to the international Human Genome Project.
He shared the Nobel Prize for medicine in 2002 for work on how genes regulate organ development and how cells die.
Jeremy Farrar, Director of Wellcome, said: “John was a brilliant scientist and a wonderful, kind and principled man. His leadership was critical to the establishment of the Human Genome Project.”