Dr Tim Hunt, joint winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, will be talking about the inspirations behind his life in science in the return of our popular ‘witness’ events.

In was in his weekly science lesson at the Dragon School near Oxford that Tim grew to find biology an easy subject, and from then on he felt he never really never had to make any more career decisions. When he was 14, Tim moved to another school where science played a much larger role in the curriculum. He loved Chemistry in particular, and the class were allowed considerable freedom, on more than one occasion started fires from distilling volatile flammable solvents.

Tim completed his undergraduate and postgraduate degree at the University of Cambridge, before continuing research in the USA and the UK. It was in the USA in the summer of 1982 that he performed the all-important experiment that revealed a protein that served to regulate the cell cycle. That protein, which announced itself by the unusual property of disappearing at the climax of cell division, he called ‘cyclin’. That discovery dramatically advanced our understanding of the fundamental process of cell division, the process of life itself. And with that understanding goes the practical possibility of intervening.

He now works at Cancer Research UK where his research looks at how cyclin-dependent protein kinases (CDKs) trigger cell cycle transitions, and how the timing of cyclin proteolysis is regulated.

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