Paul Nurse

Paul Nurse was born in Norfolk and raised in London, where he attended Harrow County Grammar School. In 1970 he received a degree in biology at the University of Birmingham and a PhD in 1973 from the University of East Anglia for research on amino acid pools in Candida utilis.

After spending several months in Urs Leupold's laboratory in Bern, Switzerland, where he learned classical genetics of fission yeast, he went to the laboratory of Murdoch Mitchison at the University of Edinburgh for postdoctoral studies on the cell cycle. Here, between 1973-1979, 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.

From 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.

In 1984, Paul joined the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (ICRF, which became Cancer Research UK in 2002) and in 1987 he identified the human cdc2 homologous gene which codes for the cyclin dependent kinase CDK1. He left ICRF in 1988 to chair the Department of Microbiology at the University of Oxford. Here he continued his work on the cell cycle and also initiated new research areas to study cell form and genomics. He returned to the ICRF as Director of Research in 1993, and in 1996 became Director General of the ICRF and in 2002 the Chief Executive of Cancer Research UK.

In 2003, Paul became President of Rockefeller University in New York City where he continued to work on the cell cycle, cell form and genomics of fission yeast.

In 2010, he became the first Director and Chief Executive of the Francis Crick Institute in London and in addition for 5 years was President of the Royal Society.