Sulston was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1986. His certificate of election reads: He was elected an EMBO Member in 1989 and awarded the George W. Beadle Award in 2000. In 2001 Sulston gave the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures on "The Secrets of Life". In 2002, he won the Dan David Prize and the Robert Burns Humanitarian Award. Later, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Sydney Brenner and Robert Horvitz, both of whom he had collaborated with at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB), for their discoveries concerning 'genetic regulation of organ development and programmed cell death'.