Profile of Stephen C. West

Abstract

Biochemist Stephen West attended university to avoid a lifetime of working with fish. Growing up near Hull, Yorkshire, England, West saw the swollen hands of the dock workers who spent their days filleting fish under ice-cold water. His father, a fish buyer, would come home with his arms covered in scales. “I don’t think I ever expected to be a successful scientist, though,” West says. “Just a job that didn’t involve fish would be quite enough.” Stephen C. West. Image courtesy of Stephen C. West. West’s trajectory away from fish landed him in a biochemistry laboratory, however, and on a course that eventually led to the Francis Crick Institute in London and election to the National Academy of Sciences in 2016. West’s research into the mechanisms of DNA repair has elucidated the pathways that strive to keep our genome error-free, and the ways in which breakdowns in this process can lead to cancer. Born in 1952, West grew up in Hessle, a few miles from the fishing port, on England’s east coast. Because of their work schedules, West’s mother would see him and his older brother off to school in the mornings, and his father would prepare dinner in the evenings. Unsurprisingly, dinner was often fish. “After eating fish for so many years, I think I couldn’t face one for 5 or 6 years after leaving home,” West says. “Now that I’m getting older, I’m starting to appreciate it again.” Growing up, West leaned toward soccer rather than academics, although he loved to read and treasured his library card. At the same time, as a teenager, West was captivated—along with the rest of the world—by the space race, which culminated in the first manned landing on the moon. Although he excelled in chemistry, biology, and physics in school, “I never …