Francis Harry Compton Crick was an English molecular biologist, biophysicist, and neuroscientist. He, James Watson, Rosalind Franklin, and Maurice Wilkins played crucial roles in deciphering the helical structure of the DNA molecule.
James Dewey Watson is an American molecular biologist, geneticist, and zoologist. In 1953, he co-authored with Francis Crick the academic paper proposing the double helix structure of the DNA molecule. Watson, Crick and Maurice Wilkins were awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material".
Sydney Brenner was a South African biologist. In 2002, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with H. Robert Horvitz and Sir John E. Sulston. Brenner made significant contributions to work on the genetic code, and other areas of molecular biology while working in the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England. He established the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans as a model organism for the investigation of developmental biology, and founded the Molecular Sciences Institute in Berkeley, California, United States.
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) is a private, non-profit institution with research programs focusing on cancer, neuroscience, plant biology, genomics, and quantitative biology.
Cancer Research UK (CRUK) is the world's largest independent cancer research organisation. It is registered as a charity in the United Kingdom and Isle of Man, and was formed on 4 February 2002 by the merger of The Cancer Research Campaign and the Imperial Cancer Research Fund. Cancer Research UK conducts research using both its own staff and grant-funded researchers. It also provides information about cancer and runs campaigns aimed at raising awareness and influencing public policy.
Howard Martin Temin was an American geneticist and virologist. He discovered reverse transcriptase in the 1970s at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, for which he shared the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Renato Dulbecco and David Baltimore.
Sir Richard Timothy Hunt, is a British biochemist and molecular physiologist. He was awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Paul Nurse and Leland H. Hartwell for their discoveries of protein molecules that control the division of cells. While studying fertilized sea urchin eggs in the early 1980s, Hunt discovered cyclin, a protein that cyclically aggregates and is depleted during cell division cycles.
Sir Paul Maxime Nurse is an English geneticist, former President of the Royal Society and Chief Executive and Director of the Francis Crick Institute. He was awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine along with Leland Hartwell and Tim Hunt for their discoveries of protein molecules that control the division of cells in the cell cycle.
Aziz Sancar is a Turkish molecular biologist specializing in DNA repair, cell cycle checkpoints, and circadian clock. In 2015, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Tomas Lindahl and Paul L. Modrich for their mechanistic studies of DNA repair. He has made contributions on photolyase and nucleotide excision repair in bacteria that have changed his field.
Richard D. Wood is an American molecular biologist specializing in research on DNA repair and mutation. He is known for pioneering studies on nucleotide excision repair (NER), particularly for reconstituting the minimum set of proteins involved in this process, identifying proliferating cell nuclear antigen (PCNA) as part of the NER complex and identifying mammalian repair polymerases.
Paul Lawrence Modrich is an American biochemist, James B. Duke Professor of Biochemistry at Duke University and Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He is known for his research on DNA mismatch repair. Modrich received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2015, jointly with Aziz Sancar and Tomas Lindahl.
Tomas Robert Lindahl FRS FMedSci is a Swedish-British scientist specialising in cancer research. In 2015, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry jointly with American chemist Paul L. Modrich and Turkish chemist Aziz Sancar for mechanistic studies of DNA repair.
Christopher John Marshall FRS FMedSci was a British scientist who worked as director of the Division for Cancer Biology at the Institute of Cancer Research. Marshall was distinguished for research in the field of tumour cell signalling. His track record includes the discovery of the N-Ras oncogene , the identification of farnesylation of Ras proteins, and the discovery that Ras signals through the MAPK/ERK pathway. These findings have led to therapeutic development of inhibitors of Ras farnesylation, MEK and B-Raf.
The Francis Crick Institute is a biomedical research centre in London, which was established in 2010 and opened in 2016. The institute is a partnership between Cancer Research UK, Imperial College London, King's College London (KCL), the Medical Research Council, University College London (UCL) and the Wellcome Trust. The institute has 1,500 staff, including 1,250 scientists, and an annual budget of over £100 million, making it the biggest single biomedical laboratory in Europe.
Simon Joseph Boulton is a British scientist who has made important contributions to the understanding of DNA repair and the treatment of cancer resulting from DNA damage. He currently occupies the position of Senior Scientist and group leader of the DSB Repair Metabolism Laboratory at the Francis Crick Institute, London. He is also an honorary Professor at University College London.
Stephen Craig West FRS is a British biochemist and molecular biologist specialising in research on DNA recombination and repair. He is known for pioneering studies on genome instability diseases including cancer. West obtained his BSc in 1974, and his PhD in 1977, both from Newcastle University. He is currently a Principal Group Leader at the Francis Crick Institute in London. He is an honorary Professor at University College London, and at Imperial College London. In recognition of his work he was awarded the Louis-Jeantet Prize for Medicine in 2007, is a fellow of the Royal Society, the Academy of Medical Sciences, an International Member of the National Academy of Sciences, and an International Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received the 2022 Royal Medal for 'discovering and determining the functions of key enzymes that are essential for DNA recombination, repair and the maintenance of genomes'.
Sir Melvyn Francis Greaves FMedSci, FRS is a British cancer biologist, and Professor of Cell Biology at the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) in London. He is noted for his research into childhood leukaemia and the roles of evolution in cancer, including important discoveries in the genetics and molecular biology underpinning leukaemia.
Sir Peter John Ratcliffe, FRS, FMedSci is a British Nobel Laureate physician-scientist who is trained as a nephrologist. He was a practising clinician at the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford and Nuffield Professor of Clinical Medicine and head of the Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine at the University of Oxford from 2004 to 2016. He has been a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford since 2004. In 2016 he became Clinical Research Director at the Francis Crick Institute, retaining a position at Oxford as a member of the Ludwig Institute of Cancer Research and director of the Target Discovery Institute, University of Oxford.
(Robert) Charles Swanton is British physician scientist specialising in oncology and cancer research. Swanton is a senior group leader at London's Francis Crick Institute, Royal Society Napier Professor in Cancer and thoracic medical oncologist at University College London and University College London Hospitals, co-director of the Cancer Research UK (CRUK) Lung Cancer Centre of Excellence, and Chief Clinician of Cancer Research UK.
John Francis Xavier Diffley is an American biochemist and Associate Research Director at the Francis Crick Institute. He is known for his contributions to the understanding of how DNA replication is initiated, and how it is subsequently regulated throughout the cell cycle and in response to DNA damage.
