Paul Nurse
Nurse, Paul (1949-), a British cellular biologist, shared the 1998 Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research with Leland Harrison Hartwell and Yoshio Masui. Nurse was honored for his pioneering work on the cell cycle that revealed how cells grow and divide. Nurse's research was crucial to a molecular understanding of cancer.
Paul Maxime Nurse was born Jan. 25, 1949, in Norwich, England. His childhood interest in science was nurtured by a biology teacher at Harrow County Grammar School. After earning a bachelor of science degree at the University of Birmingham and a Ph.D. degree at the University of East Anglia, he held a postdoctoral fellowship in zoology at the University of Edinburgh (1974–1978) and a senior research fellowship in the school of biology at the University of Sussex (1980–1984). He then headed the Cell Cycle Control Laboratory at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (ICRF) (1984–1987) in London. He was Iveagh Professor of Microbiology at the University of Oxford (1987–1991) and Napier Research Professor of the Royal Society (1991–1993). He returned to the ICRF in 1993, where he has been director-general since 1996.
In 1987, Nurse and Melanie Lee discovered that it was possible to replace the gene that controls part of the yeast cell cycle with its mammalian equivalent. This discovery, which illustrated the universal nature of the cell division mechanism, opened up a new field of cancer research, using yeast as a model system to study control of the cell division cycle in eukaryotes. Eukaryotes include all life forms except for bacteria and other primitive microorganisms.
By the beginning of the 2000's, Nurse shifted his focus to cell morphogenesis —the basic mechanisms that control cell shape. The topic is relevant to cancer, for when cancer cells metastasize, they must undergo a variety of shape changes in order to escape their primary sites and spread through the body.
Nurse was knighted in 1999.