What recent research developments are helping to further our understanding of cancer and the cell cycle?
Tim Hunt studied natural sciences at Clare College, Cambridge University, and received his PhD from there in 1968. He did his postdoctoral work at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York and at Cambridge University, where he became a research fellow and lecturer. In the 1980s Hunt uncovered a key protein in cell division called a cyclin, another piece in the jigsaw of checkpoint regulation necessary for healthy growth. His discovery in sea-urchin eggs that the levels of cyclin increase greatly as cells approach division, but then disappear, suggested that cell proliferation could eventually be artificially controlled by turning off or destroying these activating elements. In 1990, he joined Cancer Research UK. Tim Hunt is a Fellow of the Royal Society, and the recipient of many honours, including the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2001, which he received jointly with Paul Nurse and Leland Hartwell.
