Alison woollard paul nurse biography

English geneticist and Nobel laureate (born 1949)

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. 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.

Early life and education

Nurse's mother went from London to Norwich and lived with relatives while awaiting Paul's birth (at the age of 18) 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.

Paul was brought up by his grandparents (whom he took to be his parents) in North West London. He was educated at Lyon Park school in Alperton and Harrow County Grammar School. He received his BSc degree in Biology in 1970 from the University of Birmingham and his PhD degree in 1973 from the University of East Anglia for research on Candida utilis. 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.

Career and re

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. 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.

Early life and education

Nurse's mother went from London to Norwich and lived with relatives while awaiting Paul's birth (at the age of 18) 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.

Paul was brought up by his grandparents (whom he took to be his parents) in North West London. He was educated at Lyon Park school in Alperton and Harrow County Grammar School. He received his BSc degree in Biology in 1970 from the University of Birmingham and his PhD degree in 1973 from the University of East Anglia for research on Candida utilis. 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.

Career and research

Nurse continued his postdoctoral research at the laboratory of Murdoch Mitchison at the University of Edinburgh for the next six years (1973–1979).

Beginning in 1976, Nurse identified the gene

British scientist

Alison Woollard (born 1968) 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.

Early life

Woollard was born in 1968 in Kingston-upon-Thames.

Education

Woollard was educated at University of London, gaining her undergraduate degree in Biological Sciences in 1991 and gained her Doctor of Philosophy degree at the University of Oxford on fission yeast supervised by Paul Nurse in 1995.

Research

Woollard moved to the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge in 1995. Her research focuses on developmental biology of the nematodemodel organismCaenorhabditis elegans particularly RUNX genes.

She is currently the Academic Champion for Public Engagement with Research at the University of Oxford, a post which she has held since 2017.

Awards and honours

In 2013 Woollard presented the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures. She has also been interviewed on the BBC radio programme The Life Scientific.

References