Paul Nurse

Nobel laureate in Medicine Professor Sir Paul Nurse spent six years as a postdoctoral researcher in the biology department at Edinburgh, in what he later described as a period “pivotal for my entire research career”.

I went to Edinburgh on a wonderful blue day with the city under snow to discuss my aspirations, and was immediately attracted both to Murdoch's laboratory and to this beautiful city.

Paul Nurse Nobel laureate in Medicine

While at Edinburgh Sir Paul worked with Professor Murdoch Mitchison and others, using genetics to study the cell cycle responsible for the reproduction of cells, and in particular the processes regulating the cell cycle and the onset of mitosis.

He further developed his research at the University of Sussex, the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (ICRF) labs in London and the University of Oxford, returning to London as Scientific Director to ICRF in 1993. ICRF is now part of the major medical research charity Cancer Research UK.

Sir Paul was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2001, along with Leland Hartwell and Tim Hunt, for their discoveries of "key regulators of the cell cycle".

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