Tim Hunt

Sir Richard Timothy (Tim) Hunt, FRS, (b. February 19,1943) is a British biochemist.

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He was awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Leland Hartwell and Sir Paul Nurse for their discoveries regarding cell cycle regulation by cyclin and cyclin-dependent kinases.^[1] He is an honorary fellow of Clare College, Cambridge, and was knighted in the Queen's Birthday Honours List of 2006.

Career

After attending the Dragon School and Magdalen College School in Oxford, Hunt studied Natural Sciences at Clare College, Cambridge University, and received his PhD from there in 1968.^[2]

While doing summer work in 1982 at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, Hunt made his most important discovery: using the sea urchin (Arbacia punctulata) egg as his model organism, he discovered the cyclin molecule. Hunt found that cyclins begin to be synthesised after the eggs are fertilized and increase in levels during interphase, until they drop very quickly in the middle of mitosis in each cell division. He also found that cyclins are present in vertebrate cells where they also regulate the cell cycle. He and others subsequently showed that the cyclins bind and activate a family of protein kinases, now called the cyclin-dependent kinases, one of which had been identified as a crucial cell cycle regulator by Paul Nurse.

In 1991, he began work at Imperial Cancer Research Fund, now known as the Cancer Research UK London Research Institute in the United Kingdom. He became a fellow of the Royal Society in 1991 and a foreign associate of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 1999.

Hunt is a co-author of Molecular Biology of the Cell: A Problems Approach , now in its fourth edition.

References

1. ^ Nobelprize.org - Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2001
2. ^ UCL News feature on Sir Tim Hunt