Nobel winner takes the stage

SIR Paul Nurse gave the GSLSM Christmas Distinguished Guest Lecture last week — Cells and the nature of life — to a packed audience of staff and students from all parts of College.

Sir Paul Nurse

Director General of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund and and IC honorary graduate, he has been awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine — shared with Tim Hunt and Leland Hartwell — for their work on key regulators of the cell cycle.

At the ‘dress rehearsal’ for the Stockholm presentation, Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, principal of the faculty of medicine, welcomed Sir Paul to the Sir Alexander Fleming Building, saying: “You would have to be on the other side of the moon not to know why Paul needs no introduction from me.

The Nobel Prize winner went on to give a historical account of his work, illustrating it with various images and photographs.

“I’m going to drag you back to the pre-Cambrian age of biology,” announced the man who took his audience on a historical walk through past experiments.

“I’ll be giving accounts of some experiments that will astound younger members. You would not believe what we used to have to do.”

Admitting to an obsession with the cell division process, as a graduate student with a PhD in Botany he was working on amino acid metabolism, but in his spare time read relevant papers to be able to use genetics in yeast to probe cells for the molecules necessary for the cell cycle.

“I thought it would be nice to do something similar myself and worked with Murdoch Mitchison and Urs Leupokl to do fission yeast genetics.” His first paper in Nature appeared in 1975 entitled, ‘Genetic control of cell size at cell division in yeast’.

His 1981 Nature paper entitled ‘Gene required in G1 for commitment to cell cycle and in G2 for control of mitosis in fission yeast’ sparked the wry comment: “I never got the right answer. I put the result in a drawer and swore at it.”

After claiming to be a sad person for dedicating his life to cdc2, he pondered: “All this abstract stuff was fine but until you can turn something into a concrete reality, no one takes you seriously. I had to find out how to clone genes and turn them into something molecular.”

Professor Mary Ritter, GSLSM head commented: “His lecture was both excellent and entertaining, taking us through the personal odyssey of his scientific career (with generous credit given to the many colleagues who had contributed to his astonishing research programme), revealing a beautifully elegant and creative series of experimental investigations that step by step pieced together the identity and role of key molecules, such as cdc2 and CDK, that control cell cycle - from yeast to man. Defects in this process may underlie abnormalities seen in tumour cells, thus opening up new approaches to cancer therapy.

“By the end of his talk we were in no doubt  why he had been awarded the Nobel Prize - a stellar career matched by a stellar performance!”

The Nobel Prize winners received their prizes on 10 December, spending nine days giving lectures and interviews to the worldwide press. For the Nobel Prizes centenary year, all surviving recipients joined the 2001 Nobel Laureates to celebrate in Stockholm.