Tim Hunt - Higher Education and Career

Higher Education and Career

In 1961 he was accepted into Clare College, Cambridge to study Natural Sciences, graduating in 1964 and immediately beginning work in the university Department of Biochemistry under Asher Korner, working with scientists such as Louis Reichardt and Tony Hunter. A 1965 talk by Vernon Ingram interested him in haemoglobin synthesis, and at a conference in 1966 in Greece on the subject he persuaded Irving London to allow him to work in his laboratory in New York, staying from July to October 1966. He finished his PhD in 1968 and again returned to New York to work with London, where he collaborated with Nechama and Edward Kosower and Ellie Ehrenfeld. While there they discovered that tiny amounts of glutathione inhibited protein synthesis in reticulocytes and that tiny amounts of RNA killed the synthesis altogether. After returning to Cambridge he again began work with Hunter and Richard Jackson, who had discovered the RNA strand used to start haemoglobin synthesis. After 3–4 years the team discovered at least two other chemicals acting as inhibitors.

While doing summer work in 1982 at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, 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 1990, 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. In 2001 he was awarded the 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. In 2006 he was awarded the Royal Medal for 'discovering a key aspect of cell cycle control, the protein cyclin which is a component of cyclin dependent kinases, demonstrating his ability to grasp the significance of the result outside his immediate sphere of interest'. He was knighted by the Queen in the same year.

He is a member of the Advisory Council for the Campaign for Science and Engineering. He also sits on the Selection Committee for Life Science and Medicine which chooses winners of the Shaw Prize.