Paul Nurse

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. 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.

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

Paul was brought up by his grandparents (whom he took to be his parents) in North West London. He was educated at Lyon Park school in Alperton and Harrow County Grammar School. He received his BSc degree in Biology in 1970 from the University of Birmingham and his PhD degree in 1973 from the University of East Anglia for research on Candida utilis. 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 him 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. Professor Turi King traced his father for him in 2023.

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

Beginning in 1976, Nurse identified the gene cdc2 in fission yeast (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.

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.

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 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, now the Francis Crick Institute.