The David Beckham of science? Get real Dad

Medical Tribune August 2008 P16 - 17

Winning the Nobel Prize earned Sir Paul Nurse the respect of doctors, scientists
and reporters the world over. He told Medical Tribune’s David Brill what it
takes to become a Laureate, and why his daughter was less convinced.

There can be few achievements
in life that surpass
being knighted. But for a
Nobel-winning scientist there’s an
obvious trump card.
Sir Paul Nurse is one of the
privileged few who can say which
feels better. Driven by a passion
for wanting to learn how the natural
world worked, his career as
a biologist led to the “very pleasant
shock” of royal recognition in
1999.
But while his father was more
excited about the knighthood,
Nurse himself doesn’t hesitate
to name the 2001 Nobel Prize for
Physiology or Medicine as his
greatest success. Recognition of a
different kind was to follow, with
The Sun newspaper in his native
UK dubbing him “the David Beckham
of science” – an acknowledgment
of his failure to conform to
public stereotypes of white coats
and safety spectacles.
Seven years later the award
has finally sunk in, he says, but
the rapid elevation of status that
accompanies the Nobel Prize still
takes some getting used to.
“You’re really no different from
what you were before but it’s simply
that people take more notice
of you. Suddenly you become the
expert on almost anything, and not
just science. This can be slightly
embarrassing, because every time
you open your mouth you think
that someone’s going to write it
down.”
Nurse received the Nobel Prize
for his work on the molecular regulation
of the cell cycle – a research
interest which began in the 70s,
when his studies of yeast led him
to identify the cdc2 gene, which
plays an important role in controlling
the progression between the
stages of cell division. In 1987 he
discovered the human equivalent
– the CDK1 gene which encodes a
cyclin dependent kinase.
At the time of the award he
was director general of the Imperial
Cancer Research Fund (ICRF),
which later became part of the
charity Cancer Research UK. He
shared the Nobel Prize with Tim
Hunt, a British biochemist, and
Leland H. Hartwell, an American
scientist who is now director of the
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research
Center in Seattle, US.
There are certain prerequisites
to winning the award, Nurse says,
noting that hopefuls need to be
“reasonably bright, but not necessarily
super-bright, and a reasonably
good scientist and experimentalist.”
Beyond the basics, however,
the first factor he identifies is circumstance.
“It does require a certain combination
of being in the right place
at the right time, which singles out
certain advances as being iconic,
and which can be clearly identified
with a few individuals. There are
many other advances – sequencing
the human genome is one which
everybody will talk about – but it’s
very difficult to identify the person
or limited group of people who are
involved in that.”
The second key to becoming
a Nobel laureate, he says, is to be
seen to be doing something that
other people aren’t. In his case a
long-standing interest in cell division
led him to begin his research
while the competition was limited,
and by the time others recognized
the importance of the field his reputation
within it was already established.
Author of over 200 scientific
papers – many of them in Nature,
Science and Cell – Nurse also emphasizes
the importance of being
able to write clearly and insightfully.
“Often people write papers
which can never be wrong because
they just agree with everything
that’s out there and then they’re
very muddy. You’ve got to stick
your neck out a bit at a stage where
you’re prepared to be wrong… if
you end up being right, then that’s
more clearly identifiable than if
you write something which says
‘it could be this or it could be that,’
because that lacks clarity.”
Nurse grew up in Wembley in
north-west London, going on to
study at the Universities of Birmingham
and East Anglia before
joining the ICRF in 1984. After a
5-year stint as chair of the department
of microbiology at The University
of Oxford, he returned to
the ICRF as scientific director in
1993 and was appointed director
general in 1996.
In 2003 he left the UK to become
president of Rockefeller
University in New York, a position
he still holds today. He is
also a regular visitor to Singapore,
where he chairs the scientific advisory
board of the Temasek Life
Sciences Laboratory.
Becoming a Nobel laureate is
like having another job in itself,
Nurse says, admitting that the many
extra requests on his time can be difficult
to manage. But describing his
profession as “a privilege,” it’s clear
that he wouldn’t want it any other
way. And should he ever get carried
away with his new-found fame, he
need only speak to his family to be
brought back down to earth.
“I’ve got two daughters – one’s
a scientist, the other’s a TV producer
and interviewer for soccer
who has interviewed David Beckham.
And when I pointed out The
Sun headline to her she just said
‘Get real Dad. You are not David
Beckham.’”

Unraveling complexities in cancer research

What has been the greatest
breakthrough in cancer
research in the past 10 years?
Identifying which genes become
altered in cancer, and in
which combinations, has been
a major advance. We now know
that there are 300 to 400 genes that
are important, and knowing those
does two things: firstly, it helps us
understand this immensely complicated
disease much better, and
secondly it gives us new targets
to think about for both diagnosis
and therapy.
What are the greatest
challenges facing the field in
the next 10 years?
The greatest challenge is dealing
with the wide range of changes
that can bring about the cancerous
state, and producing a rational
therapeutic response to all of
those different changes. Given that
complexity, it’s not going to be like
infectious disease research, for example,
where penicillin had a major
impact. Cancer’s going to be a
more brick-in-the-wall approach
– it’s going to gradually get better.
Cancer and breakthrough don’t go
together.
What advice would you give
to doctors who want to make
a career for themselves in
research?
There is one crucial factor: they
have to be driven by a passion for
wanting to know. Doing research
is very demanding and often not
rewarding. People think that it is,
but real success is very difficult to
achieve. You have to have a real
passion to cope with the fact that
the recognition and success that
come through are limited.
Who are your scientific
heroes?
Well I’m a biologist so I’m going
to be traditional and say Darwin
as my all-time hero. I can’t
help it. And he’s English, too. In
more recent years I think I’ve got
to say Francis Crick and maybe
Sydney Brenner, both of whom I
knew.
Several countries in the
Asia Pacific region are
becoming up-and-coming
centers for research. What
advice do you have for the
scientific community in these
countries at this stage?
The difficult trick to balance is
that you need to support science
across a fairly wide base. If you
only support research which is just
before application, which is the
tendency to do if you are looking
for commercial return, you really
are not investing in the future. And
if you only support basic research
which is looking for the future then
you don’t get the immediate commercial
return. What is required is
a broad-based approach that covers
the whole timeline.
What’s the best memory
from your childhood in
London?
I think my best memory really,
scientifically at least, was
being able to access all the great
museums in London. I happened
to be a bit of a museum kid so I
thought they were fantastic. I
think it inspired me, certainly in
part.