Sir Paul Nurse
Sir Paul Nurse is a Nobel Prize winning scientist and British geneticist. He has been Chief Executive and Director of the Francis Crick Institute since its establishment in 2010 and was President of the Royal Society from 2010 to 2015. Paul Nurse has been Chancellor of the University of Bristol since 2017. In 2001, he was awarded the 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.
From 2003 to 2011, Paul Nurse served as President of Rockefeller University in New York City where he continued to work on the cell cycle, cell form and genomics of fission yeast.
Prior to this, Paul worked at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (now Cancer Research UK), where he identified the human cdc2 homologous gene which codes for the cyclin dependent kinase CDK1 and the University of Oxford, where he chaired the Department of Microbiology.
Paul started his career at Urs Leupold’s laboratory in Bern, Swizerland and then as a postdoctoral researcher at the laboratory of Murdoch Mitchison at the University of Edinburgh. It was at Edinburgh, between 1973 and 1979 that he used a classical genetic approach to study the cell cycle by identifying and studying a set of cell cycle defective mutants that have formed the basis of much of his future work.
For this work, Paul identified the cdc2 gene in the yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe and showed that it controlled the progression of the cell cycle from G1 phase to S phase and the transition from G2 phase to mitosis. In 1979 he set up his own laboratory at the University of Sussex. Here he developed techniques that allowed him to clone the cdc2 gene from fission yeast and to show that it encoded a protein kinase.