Have fun, be naughty, says Nobel laureate

Q: Could you explain the work which earned you the 2001 Nobel Prize in Medicine, for discovering key regulators of the cell cycle, to the average Joe?

In 1982, while teaching a summer course in Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory in Massachusetts, the United States, I did this incredibly simple experiment during my free time on sea urchin eggs, looking for patterns of protein synthesis before and after fertilisation.

When eggs are fertilised, they suddenly switch on protein synthesis, to make new cells. But nobody had really asked how they do it.

I noticed that one of the proteins that was made disappeared just as the cells divided, a process called mitosis. This was absolutely amazing - nobody had ever seen that happen before.

I named the protein "cyclin", after my love for cycling.

Cyclin catalyses cell mitosis, and then just before the chromosomes come apart, it is destroyed.

Q: Why is it important?

This is a process that occurs in all living organisms, except bacteria and viruses. It happens in everything from yeast to plants, from humans to animals.

It's a very ancient part of evolution.

For example, an average person makes almost 2.5 million red blood cells every second.

The numbers are astronomical.

It has helped us understand better how cells divide, including how cancer cells divide.

Q: Was this an accidental discovery like Alexander Fleming's discovery of penicillin?

I wasn't looking out for it. It came and punched me in the nose. I think that's a very, very important point: that real discoveries are totally unexpected. Because if you knew what was going on, and then you confirmed it, that's not really a discovery.

When I went back very excited to Cambridge University and told my peers, they all looked at me as if I'd gone mad. They didn't understand why I was so excited.

I myself didn't really understand what was going on. The evidence was initially very skimpy, but I just sort of knew that it was something big.

Even after we'd confirmed the research and published it in life sciences journal Cell in June 1983, a reviewer called it "wild speculation" that a protein being created and destroyed was regulating cell division.

At first I was terribly worried that I'd just dreamt it and made a mistake. And then we found the same thing happened when we looked at starfish and clams. And frogs too.

I thought: "Oh my god, I've stumbled on the secret of cell division."

And it was from that moment on that I became extremely euphoric.

Q: How has receiving a Nobel Prize changed your life?

It's made a tremendous difference, though not at first. At first you're a bit shell-shocked.

I ran into fellow recipient Paul Nurse two weeks after the announcement in 2001, and he said:

"Ah, Tim. I've just had the most ghastly weekend, because I've just felt so unworthy."

I knew exactly what he meant. It's very emotional. I'd be driving to work and tears would come to my eyes. Both my parents were dead and I thought, you know, how proud they would've been. So really, a Nobel Prize is more than anybody can bear, for most laureates.

I think most of us sort of feel, "Why me?" It was embarrassing, because other scientists also made really important contributions to the research, and in a way it's unfair.

But I've sort of come to terms with it. I took great comfort in knowing how carefully the Nobel Committee took these decisions.

We received 10 million Swedish kronor among the three of us. At the time, that was about four years' salary for me, tax-free.

This was not trivial. I could pay off the house mortgage and still have enough in reserve.

Q: You and your two colleagues Lee Hartwell and Paul Nurse shared not only the prize but also openly shared research with one another and other scientists in the decades leading up to the prize. Scientists today may find this openness surprising?

I have noticed that younger scientists are more secretive, and I think that's partly because everybody is very keen to patent everything.

Marie Curie, when she discovered radium, faced the same issue.

And she said that as scientists that's not what you do. You give it to the world. That was, on the whole, my thinking too.

There's so much government money put into research these days that they want to see a return on it.

The taxpayers want to know what it's being used for. The more money, the more you have to account for it.

That's actually a great enemy of science.

Openness is a better way of approaching science. You need every conceivable clue you can get. As far as I'm concerned, the real trick is keeping your eyes open. There's nothing more sophisticated than that.

Newton famously compared himself simply to a little boy, looking for shiny pebbles on the beach.

Q: Is that how your fellow Nobel laureates have gone about it too?

I think most Nobel laureates in science made their discovery by mucking about, having fun and being slightly naughty and not doing what they were supposed to be doing.

There used to be a wonderful section in Scientific American magazine called The Amateur Scientist. I always felt I was one, actually.

It makes discoveries easier. It's no accident that the discoveries I made experimenting on the side in Woods Hole were more interesting and important than the ones I made at work back home.

Q: Who is Tim Hunt outside of science?

Greedy, I would say! Greedy for food.

In Woods Hole, we experimented quite a bit on clams. We'd collect them from the sea. But we used only the eggs and sperm for research, so the rest of the clam was up for grabs.

We would put them in plastic bags and freeze them. After we'd collected enough, we made clam chowder in the labs. We just boiled them up in beakers.

I also love to try new food. A friend of mine used to research priapulids or penis worms. They're called that because that's what they look like.

When I was in China recently, I saw penis worms in a tank in a seafood restaurant and thought: "Oh great, let's eat them!"

This was a phylum I'd never eaten before. At the age of 70, to eat a whole new class of organism - it's pretty thrilling.

davidee@sph.com.sg

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