Mike Stratton, director of the Wellcome Sanger Institute, described the professor, who died on Tuesday, as a "great scientific visionary leader".

In 2002, he was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine along with fellow Briton Sydney Brenner and H. Robert Horvitz of the United States for their gene research.

Using a lowly earthworm, Caenorhabditis elegans, they laid bare the mechanism by which genes regulate the programmed death of cells, a process vital to understanding cancer.

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But Sulston was perhaps best known for leading Britain's contribution to the international project to map the human genome, and his insistence that the data be placed in the public domain.

"His dedication to free access to scientific information was the basis of the open access movement, and helped ensure that the reference human genome sequence was published openly for the benefit of all humanity," said Jeremy Farrar, director of Wellcome.

Sulston founded what was then the Sanger Centre, near Cambridge, in 1992 and was its director until 2000. It is now one of the leading centres for genome research in the world.

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