Sir Paul Maxime Nurse (born 25 January 1949) is an English geneticist, former President of the Royal Society and Chief Executive and Director of the Francis Crick Institute. [6] [7] [8] 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. [9]
Nurse's mother went from London to Norwich and lived with relatives while awaiting Paul's birth (at the age of 18) [10] in order to hide illegitimacy. For the rest of their lives, his maternal grandmother pretended to be his mother, and his mother pretended to be his sister. [11]
Paul was brought up by his grandparents (whom he took to be his parents) in North West London. [10] He was educated at Lyon Park school in Alperton and Harrow County Grammar School. [1] He received his BSc degree in Biology in 1970 from the University of Birmingham [12] and his PhD degree in 1973 from the University of East Anglia for research on Candida utilis . [4] He then pursued postdoctoral work at the University of Bern, the University of Edinburgh and the University of Sussex.
Nurse did not know that his "sister" was in fact his mother until he was in his 50s. His "parents" had both already died and his "sister" Miriam, eighteen years his senior, had died early of multiple sclerosis. His application for a green card for US residency while president of Rockefeller University was, to his surprise, rejected, despite his being a Nobel Prize winner, president of a university and a knight; this was because he had submitted a short-form UK birth certificate which did not name his parents. When he applied for a full birth certificate he discovered the truth, to his astonishment. [10] [13]
Nurse continued his postdoctoral research at the laboratory of Murdoch Mitchison at the University of Edinburgh for the next six years (1973–1979). [14] [15]
Beginning in 1976, Nurse identified the gene cdc2 in fission yeast [16] [17] ( Schizosaccharomyces pombe ). This gene controls the progression of the cell cycle from G1 phase to S phase and the transition from G2 phase to mitosis. In 1987, Nurse identified the homologous gene in human, Cdk1 , which codes for a cyclin dependent kinase. [18]
Working in fission yeast, Nurse identified the gene cdc2, which controls the transition from G1 to S, when the cell grows in preparation for the duplication of DNA, and G2 to M, when the cell divides. With his postdoc Melanie Lee, Nurse also found the corresponding gene, CDK1, in humans. These genes stop and start cyclin dependent kinase (CDK) by adding or removing phosphate groups. [19]
In 1984, Nurse joined the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (ICRF, now Cancer Research UK). He left in 1988 to chair the department of microbiology at the University of Oxford. He then returned to the ICRF as Director of Research in 1993, and in 1996 was named Director General of the ICRF, which became Cancer Research UK in 2002. In 2003, he became president of Rockefeller University in New York City [20] where he continued work on the cell cycle of fission yeast. In 2011 Nurse became the first Director and Chief Executive of the UK Centre for Medical Research and Innovation, [21] now the Francis Crick Institute.
On 30 November 2010, Nurse succeeded astrophysicist Martin Rees for a five-year term as President of the Royal Society until 2015.
Nurse has said good scientists must have passion "to know the answer to the questions" that interest them, along with good technical ability, and a set of attitudes including mental honesty, self-criticism, open-mindedness and scepticism. [22]
In addition to the Nobel Prize, Nurse has received numerous awards and honours. He was elected an EMBO Member in 1987 [2] and a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1989 [23] [24] and the Founder Member of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 1998. In 1995, he was awarded the Pezcoller-AACR International Award. [25] he received a Royal Medal and became a foreign associate of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. He received the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 1998. Nurse was knighted in 1999. He was awarded the French Legion d'Honneur and the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement in 2002. [26] He was also awarded the Copley Medal in 2005. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences – one of the top honours – in April 2006. He is a member of the Advisory Council for the Campaign for Science and Engineering. [27] Nurse is the 2007 recipient of the Hope Funds Award of Excellence in Basic Research. He is a Freeman of the London Borough of Harrow. In 2013, he was awarded the Albert Einstein World Award of Science by the World Cultural Council. [28] In 2015, he was elected a foreign academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, [29] and won the 10th annual Henry G. Friesen International Prize in Health Research, in Ottawa, Canada. [30] [31] He was appointed Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour (CH) in the 2022 New Year Honours for services to science and medicine in the UK and abroad. [32] In November 2022 he was appointed to the Order of Merit. [33]
Nurse has received over 60 Honorary Degrees and Fellowships, including from the University of Bath in 2002, the University of Oxford in 2003, the University of Cambridge in 2003, the University of Kent in 2012, the University of Warwick (Doctor of Science) [34] the University of Worcester [35] (Doctor of Science) in 2013, City, University of London [36] (Doctor of Science) in 2014 and McGill University [37] (Doctor of Science) in 2017. In 2020 he was awarded an honorary degree from the Mendel University in Brno in the Czech Republic. [38]
He was also appointed an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (HonFREng) in 2012 [39] and Honorary Fellow of the British Association (HonFBA) in 2013. [40] In July 2016 it was announced that he will be the next Chancellor of the University of Bristol. [41] [42] He is an Honorary Liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Scientific Instrument Makers. [43] . On 23rd November 2024 he was elected the 169th President of The Birmingham & Midland Institute by its members.
Nurse married Anne Teresa (née Talbott) in 1971; they have two daughters – Sarah, who works for ITV, and Emily, [44] a physicist based at University College London and CERN. [45] [1] He describes himself as a sceptical agnostic. [14]
Nurse has been a member of the Labour Party for nearly 40 years and is a patron of Scientists for Labour, a socialist society affiliated to them. [46] In September 2020, he was a co-author on a letter in Nature alongside the former prime minister Gordon Brown highlighting the importance of EU funding in the fight against COVID-19. [47]
As an undergraduate student at Birmingham, Nurse sold Socialist Worker , and participated in an occupation of the vice-chancellor's office. [45] [48] As a graduate student at East Anglia he continued to sell Socialist Worker, and was sympathetic to the International Socialist Tendency but never formally joined the movement. [49]
Nurse has criticised potential Republican Party candidates for the US presidential nomination for opposing the teaching of natural selection, stem cell research on cell lines from human embryos, and anthropogenic climate change, even partially blaming scientists for not speaking up. [50] He was alarmed that this could happen in the US, a world leader in science, "the home of Benjamin Franklin, Richard Feynman and Jim Watson". [50]
One problem, Nurse said, was "treating scientific discussion as if it were political debate," using rhetorical tricks rather than logic. Another was the state of science teaching in the schools, which does not teach citizens how to discuss science – particularly in religious schools, even in the United Kingdom. [50] Nurse has written that "we need to emphasise why the scientific process is such a reliable generator of knowledge with its respect for evidence, for scepticism, for consistency of approach, for the constant testing of ideas." [50] Furthermore, Nurse feels that scientific leaders "have a responsibility to expose the bunkum". They should take on politicians, and expose nonsense during elections. [50]
In August 2014, Nurse was one of 200 public figures who were signatories to a letter to The Guardian expressing their hope that Scotland would vote to remain part of the United Kingdom in September's referendum on that issue. [51]
Nurse believes that scientists should speak out about science in public affairs and challenge politicians who support policies based on pseudoscience. [52]
Michael Smith was a British-born Canadian biochemist and businessman. He shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Kary Mullis for his work in developing site-directed mutagenesis. Following a PhD in 1956 from the University of Manchester, he undertook postdoctoral research with Har Gobind Khorana at the British Columbia Research Council in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Subsequently, Smith worked at the Fisheries Research Board of Canada Laboratory in Vancouver before being appointed a professor of biochemistry in the UBC Faculty of Medicine in 1966. Smith's career included roles as the founding director of the UBC Biotechnology Laboratory and the founding scientific leader of the Protein Engineering Network of Centres of Excellence (PENCE). In 1996 he was named Peter Wall Distinguished Professor of Biotechnology. Subsequently, he became the founding director of the Genome Sequencing Centre at the BC Cancer Research Centre.
Schizosaccharomyces pombe, also called "fission yeast", is a species of yeast used in traditional brewing and as a model organism in molecular and cell biology. It is a unicellular eukaryote, whose cells are rod-shaped. Cells typically measure 3 to 4 micrometres in diameter and 7 to 14 micrometres in length. Its genome, which is approximately 14.1 million base pairs, is estimated to contain 4,970 protein-coding genes and at least 450 non-coding RNAs.
Leland Harrison "Lee" Hartwell is an American former president and director of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington. He shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Paul Nurse and Tim Hunt, for their discoveries of protein molecules that control the division (duplication) of cells.
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.
Elizabeth Helen Blackburn is an Australian-American Nobel laureate who is the former president of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. In 1984, Blackburn co-discovered telomerase, the enzyme that replenishes the telomere, with Carol W. Greider. For this work, she was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, sharing it with Carol W. Greider and Jack W. Szostak, becoming the first Australian woman Nobel laureate.
Randy Wayne Schekman is an American cell biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, former editor-in-chief of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and former editor of Annual Review of Cell and Developmental Biology. In 2011, he was announced as the editor of eLife, a new high-profile open-access journal published by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society and the Wellcome Trust launching in 2012. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1992. Schekman shared the 2013 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with James Rothman and Thomas C. Südhof for their ground-breaking work on cell membrane vesicle trafficking.
Rolf Martin Zinkernagel AC is a professor of experimental immunology at the University of Zurich. Along with Peter C. Doherty, he shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of how the immune system recognizes virus-infected cells.
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.
Tak Wah Mak, is a Canadian medical researcher, geneticist, oncologist, and biochemist. He first became widely known for his discovery of the T-cell receptor in 1983 and pioneering work in the genetics of immunology. In 1995, Mak published a landmark paper on the discovery of the function of the immune checkpoint protein CTLA-4, thus opening the path for immunotherapy/checkpoint inhibitors as a means of cancer treatment. Mak is also the founder of Agios Pharmaceuticals, whose lead compound, IDHIFA®, was approved by the FDA for acute myeloid leukemia in August 2017, becoming the first drug specifically targeting cancer metabolism to be used for cancer treatment. He has worked in a variety of areas including biochemistry, immunology, and cancer genetics.
Venkatraman Ramakrishnan is a British-American structural biologist. He shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Thomas A. Steitz and Ada Yonath for research on the structure and function of ribosomes.
Kim Ashley Nasmyth is an English geneticist, the Whitley Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Oxford, a Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, former scientific director of the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP), and former head of the Department of Biochemistry, University of Oxford. He is best known for his work on the segregation of chromosomes during cell division.
Sir David Philip Lane is a British immunologist, molecular biologist and cancer researcher. He is currently working in the Department of Microbiology, Tumor and Cell Biology at the Karolinska Institute and is Chairman of Chugai Pharmabody. He is best known for the discovery of p53, one of the most important tumour suppressor genes.
The Cancer Research UK London Research Institute (LRI) was a biological research facility which conducted research into the basic biology of cancer.
Sir David Charles Baulcombe is a British plant scientist and geneticist. As of October 2024 he was Head of Group, Gene Expression, in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Cambridge, and the Edward Penley Abraham Royal Society Research Professor and Regius Professor of Botany Emeritus at Cambridge. He held the Regius botany chair in that department from 2007 to 2020.
Jack William Szostak is a Canadian American biologist of Polish British descent, Nobel Prize laureate, University Professor at the University of Chicago, former Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, and Alexander Rich Distinguished Investigator at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston. Szostak has made significant contributions to the field of genetics. His achievement helped scientists to map the location of genes in mammals and to develop techniques for manipulating genes. His research findings in this area are also instrumental to the Human Genome Project. He was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, along with Elizabeth Blackburn and Carol W. Greider, for the discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres.
Tomas Robert Lindahl 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.
John Murdoch Mitchison was a British zoologist.
Alison Woollard is a British biologist. She is a lecturer in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Oxford where she is also a Fellow of Hertford College, Oxford.
Carl-Henrik Heldin is Chairman of the Board for the Nobel Foundation, and a molecular biologist and medical researcher. He has been director of the Uppsala branch of Ludwig Cancer Research since 1986 and professor in molecular cell biology at the medical faculty of Uppsala University since 1992. He is vice-president of the European Research Council since 2011 and was appointed chairman of the Nobel Foundation in 2013.
Melanie Georgina Lee CBE is an English pharmaceutical industry executive and CEO of LifeArc, succeeding Dave Tapolczay in November 2018.
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