Nobel Prize Winner to Deliver 2006 Nelson Medical Lecture

Nobel-Prize winner Sir Paul Nurse, president of the Laboratory of Yeast Genetics and Cell Biology at The Rockefeller University, will deliver the 2006 Nelson Medical Lecture on Wednesday, Jan. 11, at 4:10 p.m. at the UC Davis campus.

Nurse will deliver his lecture, titled “Cell Cycle Control,” in the auditorium of the Genome and Biomedical Sciences Facility.

Nurse’s early, postgraduate experiments on yeast led to the discovery of the gene that controls cell division and earned him a worldwide reputation. Following his groundbreaking research, conducted mainly in the 1980s, Nurse joined the Imperial Cancer Research Fund in 1996, doubling its funding in five years. In early 2002, the ICRF and The Cancer Research Fund joined forces, becoming Cancer Research UK. Nurse’s discoveries and leadership qualities have galvanized his research team and already have led to new treatments and medicines for cancer.

Nurse has expressed his commitment to conquering disease this way: “I could have gone into industry and been a multimillionaire by now, but I wanted to be at the cutting edge of research, helping to save lives without the constraint of the market.”

The late C. Nelson Hackett of Piedmont, California, established the Nelson Lectureship at the UC Davis School of Medicine in 1968, in honor of his grandparents and early Woodland pioneers, Camillus and Elizabeth Nelson. The lectureship provides for a series of lectures on the history of medicine and encourages the appointment of distinguished physicians and health scientists as visiting faculty members.

Nurse received his bachelor’s degree in biological sciences from the University of Birmingham in 1970, and his doctoral degree in cell biology/biochemistry in 1973 from the University of East Anglia. He has received many major awards and medals, including the Nobel Prize, the Royal Society Welcome Medal, the Rosenstiel Award and the Medal for Distinguished Work in Basic Medical Sciences, the Gairdner Foundational International Award, the Royal Society Royal Medal, the Royal Society of Medicine Gold Medal, and the Albert Lasker Award. He is a fellow of the Royal Society, a member of Academia Europaea, a foreign associate of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and a founding member of the Academy of Medical Sciences.

Nurse will make two other presentations during his visit to UC Davis. He will conduct a graduate student seminar on Wednesday, Jan. 11, at 12:10 p.m. in the auditorium of the Genome and Biomedical Sciences Facility.

He will present an internal medicine grand rounds, titled “The Great Ideas of Biology,” on Thursday, Jan. 12, at 8 a.m. in the Patient Support Services Building auditorium at UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento.