May 6, 2004
Cyclins and the cell cycle
Dr. Richard Timothy (Tim) Hunt, who shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Dr. Paul Nurse and Dr. Lee Hartwell of the UW and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, will be at the UW next week to present the Edwin G. Krebs Lecture in Molecular Pharmacology.
Hunt will speak on “Control of the Cell Cycle” at 3:30 p.m., Tuesday, May 11, in room T-625 of the Health Sciences Center. The lecture is open to everyone.
The speaker is a principal scientist at Cancer Research UK, Clare Hall Laboratories near London. He is a leader in research on regulation of protein synthesis and on control of the cell cycle and cell division by regulatory proteins. His early work focused on regulation of protein synthesis by protein phosphorylation in blood cells and sea urchin eggs.
In 1983, he reported the discovery of “cyclins,” regulatory proteins that are synthesized and degraded with each cleavage in developing sea urchin eggs.
Subsequent work showed that the oscillating synthesis and degradation of cyclins, which bind and activate cyclin-dependent protein kinases, controls when a cell proceeds through the specific steps of the cell cycle and undergoes cell division. The work demonstrated the role of cyclins and cyclin-dependent protein kinases as master regulators of the cell cycle.
“These discoveries have had an enormous impact on our understanding of the control of cell division in normal and cancer cells,” said Dr. Bill Catterall, professor and chair of the UW Department of Pharmacology.
In addition to his research, Hunt has co-authored two important textbooks: The Cell Cycle: An Introduction, with Dr. Andrew Murray, and Molecular Biology of the Cell: A Problems Approach, with Dr. John Wilson.
Hunt is on the editorial boards of the Journal of Cell Science and Molecular Biology of the Cell. In addition to British and European science and medical organizations, he is a foreign associate of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. He has won the French Legion of Honor and numerous other international awards.
He earned a bachelor’s degree and a Ph.D. degree in biochemistry from Cambridge University in the United Kingdom. After postdoctoral research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, he returned to Cambridge as a research fellow and lecturer before moving to Cancer Research UK in 1991. He was also an instructor for several summers at the Marine Biological Laboratories in Woods Hole, Mass.
This is the 17th Annual Edwin G. Krebs Lecture in Molecular Pharmacology, sponsored by an endowment from Sterling Winthrop, Inc.
The lectureship honors Krebs, UW professor emeritus of pharmacology and biochemistry who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1992 with Dr. Edmond Fischer for their discovery of protein phosphorylation as a key cellular regulatory mechanism. Krebs chaired the UW Department of Pharmacology from 1977 to 1984.
