Getting in and out of Mitosis

Prof. Tim Hunt was awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine together with Leland H. Hartwell and Sir Paul Nurse "for their discoveries of key regulators of the cell cycle." He finished his PhD in 1968. He  discovered that tiny amounts of glutathione inhibited protein synthesis in reticulocytes, and that tiny amounts of RNA killed the synthesis all together. After returning to Cambridge he 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.