Laureation address: Sir Paul Nurse CH FRS

Honorary Degree of Doctor of Science
Laureation by Bishop Wardlaw Professor Sir Ian Boyd FRS, School of Biology

Friday 17 June 2022

Vice-Chancellor, it is my privilege to present for the degree of Doctor of Science, honoris causa, Paul Maxime Nurse.

Sir Paul Nurse could fairly be described as the greatest British scientist of today. 

He attended Harrow County Grammar School and graduated in Biology from the University of Birmingham in 1970 and then took a PhD from the University of East Anglia.

After postdoctoral studies at the University of Edinburgh, and a period as a fledgling academic at the University of Sussex, he moved to the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (later Cancer Research UK) where he eventually became Director of Research, and then ultimately Chief Executive. He also spent some time as the Chair of the Department of Microbiology at the University of Oxford.

Sir Paul’s research has focused on the genetic control of the cell cycle, the process which leads to cell division and multiplication. His early breakthrough was to discover a gene which coded for a protein that controlled the process of cell division in yeast. He then found the homologue of this gene in humans. Since cancer is caused by uncontrolled cell division, this had obvious applications for the understanding and treatment of this devastating disease.

In 2001, Sir Paul was awarded a Nobel Prize for his discoveries of these proteins. In 1989 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and he became President of the Royal Society in 2010. He was knighted in 1999 and was made a Companion of Honour this year for services to science and medicine in the UK and abroad.

He is the recipient of numerous other awards for his research including the Royal Society’s Royal Medal and the Copley Medal, the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research, the French Légion d'Honneur, the Japanese Order of the Rising Sun and the Albert Einstein World Award of Science.

Sir Paul has dedicated himself to leadership by also building scientific opportunities for others. In addition to leading Cancer Research UK, he has been President of Rockefeller University in New York and in 2010 he became the inaugural Chief Executive of the Francis Crick Institute in London where he remains to this day. 

In 2015, he made sweeping recommendations about how to improve the structure and organisation of the UK’s sponsorship of research. This lead, in 2018, to the creation of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) which spends about £8.5 billion of taxpayers’ money on research every year.

Vice-Chancellor, in recognition of his major contribution to science, I invite you to confer the degree of Doctor of Science, honoris causa, on Paul Maxime Nurse.