Abstract
Tim Hunt took an undergraduate degree in Natural Sciences at Cambridge in 1964, and his PhD and subsequent work focussed on the control of protein synthesis until 1982, when his adventitious discovery of the central cell cycle regulator cyclin, while he was teaching at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, redirected him to the study of cell cycle regulation. From 1990 to his retirement Tim worked in the Clare Hall Laboratories of Cancer Research UK. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine with Lee Hartwell and Paul Nurse in 2001, and talked to us about the series of coincidences that led him to the prizewinning discovery.
Highlights
Tim Hunt took an undergraduate degree in Natural Sciences at Cambridge in 1964, and his PhD and subsequent work focussed on the control of protein synthesis until 1982, when his adventitious discovery of the central cell cycle regulator cyclin, while he was teaching at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, redirected him to the study of cell cycle regulation
I’d gone to Woods Hole originally to study how protein synthesis was turned on at fertilization, but you couldn’t avoid noticing that after they had turned on protein synthesis, they divided and went on dividing
1982, my main research problem was going very badly, so as a sort of afterthought — the formal part of teaching the course had stopped — I just idly wondered whether the patterns of protein synthesis in parthenogenetically activated sea urchin eggs was the same as or different from what happened when you fertilized them properly
Summary
Tim Hunt took an undergraduate degree in Natural Sciences at Cambridge in 1964, and his PhD and subsequent work focussed on the control of protein synthesis until 1982, when his adventitious discovery of the central cell cycle regulator cyclin, while he was teaching at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, redirected him to the study of cell cycle regulation. I began to think about cell cycle control from that moment. That didn’t strike anybody as unusual, because if you think about normal cells, they have to double in size, so they need to make new proteins.
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