How to win a Nobel Prize: stumbling on the secret of cell division

Abstract

I grew up in Oxford wanting to be a scientist, loving gadgets and processes like melting lead pipes or electrolyzing salt solutions to make poisonous and explosive gases. Luckily, I had excellent teachers who channeled these enthusiasms into a deeper and more formal understanding of chemistry and biology (physics, alas, was beyond my grasp) so that it was possible to study at Cambridge University and carry on there with a Ph.D. in biochemistry, on the business of the control of haemoglobin synthesis. I’ll explain how I arrived at this—it was an accident—and also where I pursued the subject. It took ten years, many interesting side roads, a lot of travel and a devastating fire to solve the problem of how the synthesis of haem was coordinated with the synthesis of globin.