Cell Cycle Control

Paul Nurse, a native of the United Kingdom, graduated from Birmingham University in 1973 and received his PhD. in cell biology and biochemistry from the University of East Anglia, both in the UK. He did postdoctoral work at universities in Bern, Switzerland, Edinburgh, Scotland and Sussex, Great Britain, and joined the Imperial Cancer Research Fund [ICRF] in London in 1984. In 1988, he moved to the University of Oxford as chair of its department of microbiology, and returned to ICRF in 1993 as director of research. He became director general in 1996 and in 2002 was appointed chief executive of Cancer Research UK, formed when ICRF merged with the Cancer Research Campaign. He moved his laboratory to the United States upon being named president of Rockefeller University in 2003. He is also director of the Anderson Center for Cancer Research at Rockefeller. Dr. Nurse is a member of the Royal Society and a foreign associate of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. He received the Royal Society's Copley Medal in 2005, the Légion d'Honneur in 2002 and the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2001. In 1999, he was honored with knighthood in Great Britain for services to cancer research and cell biology. He received the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 1998 and the Gairdner Foundation International Award in 1992.