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Sir Paul Nurse
OM CH FRS FMedSci HonFREng HonFBA MAE
Chancellor of the University of Bristol
Incumbent
Assumed office
2017
PresidentHugh Brady
Preceded byThe Baroness Hale of Richmond
61st President of the Royal Society
In office
1 December 2010 – 1 December 2015
Preceded byThe Lord Rees of Ludlow
Succeeded byVenkatraman Ramakrishnan
9th President of Rockefeller University
In office
2003–2011
Preceded byArnold Levine
Succeeded byMarc Tessier-Lavigne
Personal details
Born
Paul Maxime Nurse

(1949-01-25) 25 January 1949 (age 75)[1]
Norwich, Norfolk, England
Spouse
Anne Teresa Talbott
​
(m. 1971)​
[1]
Children2 daughters[1]
WebsiteFrancis Crick Institute - Paul Nurse
Alma mater
Awards
Scientific career
Fields
Institutions
ThesisThe spatial and temporal organisation of amino acid pools in Candida utilis (1974)
Doctoral advisorAnthony P. Sims[4]
Doctoral studentsAlison Woollard[5]

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.[6][7][8] 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.[9]

Early life and education

[edit]

Nurse's mother went from London to Norwich and lived with relatives while awaiting Paul's birth (at the age of 18)[10] 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.[11]

Paul was brought up by his grandparents (whom he took to be his parents) in North West London.[10] He was educated at Lyon Park school in Alperton and Harrow County Grammar School.[1] He received his BSc degree in Biology in 1970 from the University of Birmingham[12] and his PhD degree in 1973 from the University of East Anglia for research on Candida utilis.[4] 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.[10][13]

Career and research

[edit]

Nurse continued his postdoctoral research at the laboratory of Murdoch Mitchison at the University of Edinburgh for the next six years (1973–1979).[14][15]

Beginning in 1976, Nurse identified the gene cdc2 in fission yeast[16][17] (Schizosaccharomyces pombe). This gene controls the progression of the cell cycle from G1 phase to S phase and the transition from G2 phase to mitosis. In 1987, Nurse identified the homologous gene in human, Cdk1, which codes for a cyclin dependent kinase.[18]

Working in fission yeast, Nurse identified the gene cdc2, which controls the transition from G1 to S, when the cell grows in preparation for the duplication of DNA, and G2 to M, when the cell divides. With his postdoc Melanie Lee, Nurse also found the corresponding gene, CDK1, in humans. These genes stop and start cyclin dependent kinase (CDK) by adding or removing phosphate groups.[19]

In 1984, Nurse joined the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (ICRF, now Cancer Research UK). He left in 1988 to chair the department of microbiology at the University of Oxford. He then returned to the ICRF as Director of Research in 1993, and in 1996 was named Director General of the ICRF, which became Cancer Research UK in 2002. In 2003, he became president of Rockefeller University in New York City[20] where he continued work on the cell cycle of fission yeast. In 2011 Nurse became the first Director and Chief Executive of the UK Centre for Medical Research and Innovation,[21] now the Francis Crick Institute.

On 30 November 2010, Nurse succeeded astrophysicist Martin Rees for a five-year term as President of the Royal Society until 2015.

Nurse has said good scientists must have passion "to know the answer to the questions" that interest them, along with good technical ability, and a set of attitudes including mental honesty, self-criticism, open-mindedness and scepticism.[22]

Awards and honours

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In addition to the Nobel Prize, Nurse has received numerous awards and honours. He was elected an EMBO Member in 1987[2] and a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1989[23][24] and the Founder Member of the Academy of Medical Sciences in 1998. In 1995, he was awarded the Pezcoller-AACR International Award.[25] he received a Royal Medal and became a foreign associate of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. He received the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 1998. Nurse was knighted in 1999. He was awarded the French Legion d'Honneur and the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement in 2002.[26] He was also awarded the Copley Medal in 2005. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences – one of the top honours – in April 2006. He is a member of the Advisory Council for the Campaign for Science and Engineering.[27] Nurse is the 2007 recipient of the Hope Funds Award of Excellence in Basic Research. He is a Freeman of the London Borough of Harrow. In 2013, he was awarded the Albert Einstein World Award of Science by the World Cultural Council.[28] In 2015, he was elected a foreign academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences,[29] and won the 10th annual Henry G. Friesen International Prize in Health Research, in Ottawa, Canada.[30][31] He was appointed Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour (CH) in the 2022 New Year Honours for services to science and medicine in the UK and abroad.[32] In November 2022 he was appointed to the Order of Merit.[33]

Nurse has received over 60 Honorary Degrees and Fellowships, including from the University of Bath in 2002, the University of Oxford in 2003, the University of Cambridge in 2003, the University of Kent in 2012, the University of Warwick (Doctor of Science)[34] the University of Worcester[35] (Doctor of Science) in 2013, City, University of London[36] (Doctor of Science) in 2014 and McGill University[37] (Doctor of Science) in 2017. In 2020 he was awarded an honorary degree from the Mendel University in Brno in the Czech Republic.[38]

He was also appointed an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (HonFREng) in 2012[39] and Honorary Fellow of the British Association (HonFBA) in 2013.[40] In July 2016 it was announced that he will be the next Chancellor of the University of Bristol.[41][42] He is an Honorary Liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Scientific Instrument Makers.[43]. On 23rd November 2024 he was elected the 169th President of The Birmingham & Midland Institute by its members.

Personal life

[edit]

Nurse married Anne Teresa (née Talbott) in 1971; they have two daughters – Sarah, who works for ITV, and Emily,[44] a physicist based at University College London and CERN.[45][1] He describes himself as a sceptical agnostic.[14]

Political views

[edit]

Nurse has been a member of the Labour Party for nearly 40 years and is a patron of Scientists for Labour, a socialist society affiliated to them.[46] In September 2020, he was a co-author on a letter in Nature alongside the former prime minister Gordon Brown highlighting the importance of EU funding in the fight against COVID-19.[47]

As an undergraduate student at Birmingham, Nurse sold Socialist Worker, and participated in an occupation of the vice-chancellor's office.[45][48] As a graduate student at East Anglia he continued to sell Socialist Worker, and was sympathetic to the International Socialist Tendency but never formally joined the movement.[49]

Nurse has criticised potential Republican Party candidates for the US presidential nomination for opposing the teaching of natural selection, stem cell research on cell lines from human embryos, and anthropogenic climate change, even partially blaming scientists for not speaking up.[50] He was alarmed that this could happen in the US, a world leader in science, "the home of Benjamin Franklin, Richard Feynman and Jim Watson".[50]

One problem, Nurse said, was "treating scientific discussion as if it were political debate," using rhetorical tricks rather than logic. Another was the state of science teaching in the schools, which does not teach citizens how to discuss science – particularly in religious schools, even in the United Kingdom.[50] Nurse has written that "we need to emphasise why the scientific process is such a reliable generator of knowledge with its respect for evidence, for scepticism, for consistency of approach, for the constant testing of ideas."[50] Furthermore, Nurse feels that scientific leaders "have a responsibility to expose the bunkum". They should take on politicians, and expose nonsense during elections.[50]

In August 2014, Nurse was one of 200 public figures who were signatories to a letter to The Guardian expressing their hope that Scotland would vote to remain part of the United Kingdom in September's referendum on that issue.[51]

Nurse believes that scientists should speak out about science in public affairs and challenge politicians who support policies based on pseudoscience.[52]

Books

[edit]
  • What Is Life?: Five Great Ideas in Biology (2021), W. W. Norton & Company[53]

See also

[edit]

References

[edit]
  1. ^ a b c d e "NURSE, Sir Paul (Maxime)". Who's Who. Vol. 2014 (online Oxford University Press ed.). A & C Black. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  2. ^ a b "EMBO profile: Paul Nurse". people.embo.org.
  3. ^ "Professor Paul NURSE". Fondation Louis-Jeantet. October 2017. Retrieved 13 October 2021.
  4. ^ a b Nurse, Paul Maxime (1974). The spatial and temporal organisation of amino acid pools in Candida utilis (PhD thesis). University of East Anglia. OCLC 500529574. EThOS uk.bl.ethos.467339.
  5. ^ Woollard, Alison (1995). Cell cycle control in fission yeast. bodleian.ox.ac.uk (DPhil thesis). University of Oxford. OCLC 43404640. EThOS uk.bl.ethos.318479.
  6. ^ Nurse, P (2012). "In answer to questions about the Francis Crick Institute". The Lancet. 379 (9835): 2427–8. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(12)61066-6. PMID 22748588. S2CID 37007507.
  7. ^ Nurse, Paul; Treisman, Richard; Smith, Jim (2013). "Building better institutions". Science. 341 (6141): 10. Bibcode:2013Sci...341...10N. doi:10.1126/science.1242307. PMID 23828914.
  8. ^ Paul Nurse's publications indexed by the Scopus bibliographic database. (subscription required)
  9. ^ "The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2001". The Nobel Prize. Retrieved 13 October 2021.
  10. ^ a b c "Sir Paul Nurse: 'I looked at my birth certificate. That was not my mother's name'". TheGuardian.com. 9 August 2014.
  11. ^ Al-Khalili, Jim. "Paul Nurse - life and work". The Life Scientific. Retrieved 13 October 2021.
  12. ^ Our Alumni Archived 21 April 2015 at the Wayback Machine – website of the University of Birmingham
  13. ^ Andrew Anthony (15 August 2020). "Sir Paul Nurse: 'The UK has taken a leap several decades into the past'". The Guardian.
  14. ^ a b Paul Nurse on Nobelprize.org Edit this at Wikidata, accessed 28 April 2020 including the Nobel Lecture Nobel Lecture 9 December 2001 Controlling the Cell Cycle
  15. ^ Fantes PA; Hoffman CS (2016). "A Brief History of Schizosaccharomyces pombe Research: A Perspective Over the Past 70 Years". Genetics. 203 (2): 621–9. doi:10.1534/genetics.116.189407. PMC 4896181. PMID 27270696.
  16. ^ Nurse, P.; Thuriaux, P.; Nasmyth, K. (1976). "Genetic control of the cell division cycle in the fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe". Molecular & General Genetics. 146 (2): 167–178. doi:10.1007/BF00268085. PMID 958201. S2CID 24156567.
  17. ^ Nurse, P. (2004). "Wee beasties". Nature. 432 (7017): 557. Bibcode:2004Natur.432..557N. doi:10.1038/432557a. PMID 15577889. S2CID 29840746.
  18. ^ Lee, M. G.; Nurse, P. (1987). "Complementation used to clone a human homologue of the fission yeast cell cycle control gene cdc2". Nature. 327 (6117): 31–35. Bibcode:1987Natur.327...31L. doi:10.1038/327031a0. PMID 3553962. S2CID 4300190.
  19. ^ "The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2001 - Illustrated Lecture". The Nobel Prize. Retrieved 14 October 2021.
  20. ^ Sample, Ian (17 September 2003). "Paul Nurse talks to Ian Sample about money, moustaches, and his move to Manhattan". The Guardian.
  21. ^ "Project Press Release". UK Centre for Medical Research and Innovation web site. 15 July 2010. Retrieved 11 August 2010.[permanent dead link‍]
  22. ^ "Unavailable private video". youtube.com. Archived from the original on 14 October 2011.
  23. ^ "Fellowship of the Royal Society 1660–2015". Royal Society. Archived from the original on 15 October 2015.
  24. ^ Anon (1989). "EC/1989/23 Nurse, Sir Paul Maxime". London: The Royal Society. Archived from the original on 3 September 2014.
  25. ^ "THE PEZCOLLER FOUNDATION – AACR INTERNATIONAL AWARD AND THE NOBEL PRIZE". Fondazione Pezcoller - Pezcoller Foundation. Retrieved 14 October 2021.
  26. ^ "Golden Plate Awardees of the American Academy of Achievement". achievement.org. American Academy of Achievement.
  27. ^ "Advisory Council of the Campaign for Science and Engineering". Archived from the original on 28 August 2010. Retrieved 11 February 2011.
  28. ^ "World Cultural Council 30th Award Ceremony". Nanyang Technological University. 2 October 2013. Retrieved 2 October 2013. [dead link‍]
  29. ^ "Announcement of the list of elected academicians of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2015 关于公布2015年中国科学院院士增选当选院士名单的公告". Chinese Academy of Sciences. Retrieved 14 October 2021.
  30. ^ "The Eminent Dr. Nurse". Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Retrieved 26 February 2016.
  31. ^ "The 2015 Henry G. Friesen International Prize in Health Research is awarded to Sir Paul... – TORONTO, May 4, 2015". Cision - Friends of Canadian Institutes of Health Research. Retrieved 26 February 2016.
  32. ^ "Order of the Companions of Honour". The London Gazette. 1 January 2022.
  33. ^ His Majesty The King (11 November 2022). "New Appointments to the Order of Merit". royal.uk. Retrieved 11 November 2022.
  34. ^ "Warwick honorary degrees for stars of Gavin & Stacey & Hustle, RSC & Royal Court Artistic Directors, scientists, historians, philanthropist & a US government adviser". University of Warwick. 28 June 2013. Retrieved 30 October 2013.
  35. ^ "Worcester honorary degrees and Fellowships". University of Worcester. 21 November 2013. Archived from the original on 3 April 2014. Retrieved 21 November 2013.
  36. ^ "Honorary graduates 2014". Archived from City University London website in Wayback Machine Internet Archive. Archived from the original on 2 February 2015. Retrieved 14 October 2021.
  37. ^ "McGill Honorary Doctorates 2017". McGill University.
  38. ^ Polčáková, Petra (2 March 2020). "A top scientist very often moves on the edge of failure, says Nobelist Nurse". Universitas - magazine for universities. Retrieved 14 October 2021.
  39. ^ "List of Fellows". Archived from Royal Academy of Engineering on Wayback Machine. Archived from the original on 12 August 2014. Retrieved 14 October 2021.
  40. ^ "Our Honorary Fellows". British Science Association. 28 February 2018. Retrieved 14 October 2021.
  41. ^ "University of Bristol press release". University of Bristol. Retrieved 14 October 2021.
  42. ^ "Sir Paul Nurse becomes Bristol University chancellor". BBC News. 1 January 2017.
  43. ^ "Honorary members - Honorary Liverymen of the Company". The Worshipful Company of Scientific Instrument Makers. Retrieved 15 October 2021.
  44. ^ Emily Nurse's ORCID 0000-0001-6905-1285
  45. ^ a b McKie, Robin (24 October 2010). "Paul Nurse: Home truths for the gene genius". theguardian.com. London: The Observer. Archived from the original on 5 March 2016.
  46. ^ "About SFL".
  47. ^ Fernando, Benjamin; Brown, Gordon; Thomas, Emily; Head, Michael; Nurse, Paul; Rees, Martin (22 September 2020). "COVID-19 shows UK–EU collaborations are irreplaceable". Nature. 586 (7828): 200. Bibcode:2020Natur.586..200F. doi:10.1038/d41586-020-02687-6. PMID 32963368.
  48. ^ Brooks, Michael (9 June 2011). "The Science Interview – Paul Nurse". New Statesman. London: Progressive Media International. Retrieved 13 July 2015.
  49. ^ "Somehow, I knew I'd see you again, you bastard". Times Higher Education. TES Global. 27 June 2003. Retrieved 13 July 2015.
  50. ^ a b c d e Stamp out anti-science; it's time to reject political movements that turn their backs on science, Paul Nurse, New Scientist, 17 September 2011
  51. ^ "Celebrities' open letter to Scotland – full text and list of signatories". The Guardian. London. 7 August 2014. Retrieved 26 August 2014.
  52. ^ Nurse, Paul. "Stamp out anti-science in US politics". New Scientist.
  53. ^ Nurse, Paul (2 February 2021). What Is Life?. National Geographic Books. ISBN 978-0393541151.
[edit]
Wikiquote has quotations related to Paul Nurse.
Professional and academic associations
Preceded by 61st President of the Royal Society
2010–2015 		Succeeded by
Academic offices
Preceded by 9th President of Rockefeller University
2003–2011 		Succeeded by
Preceded by Chancellor of the University of Bristol
2017–present 		Incumbent
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