Nurse, Sir Paul Maxime, 1949–, British biochemist, Ph.D. Univ. of East Anglia, 1973. Nurse was associated with the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (now Cancer Research UK London Research Institute) for two periods in his career (1984–88 and 1993–2003), becoming director-general in 1996, and was a professor at Oxford (1988–93). He was president of Rockefeller Univ., New York City, from 2003 to 2011, when he became director of the UK Centre for Medical Research and Innovation, now the Francis Crick Institute. Nurse is also president (2010–) of the Royal Society. In 2001 Nurse was co-recipient with Leland H. Hartwell and Timothy R. Hunt of the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for their discoveries of key regulators of the cell cycle. Nurse identified, cloned, and characterized cyclin-dependent kinase (CDK), a key regulator of the cell cycle. The discoveries of three are important to the understanding of the development of chromosomal instabilities in cancer cells.
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