Abstract of the Commemorative lecture
Thinking about how living things work
I have been fascinated since I was young by the idea that we can use the tools of science to understand how living creatures work, and I can still vividly remember the moment when this notion forcibly struck me as a real possibility, thanks to the persuasive words of a biology teacher. Human beings all start life as a single cell, and indeed we can think of the cell as the basic unit of life — how cells function, how they evolve to become more complex, how they cooperate with one another to make structures such as the human brain, and what goes wrong with the cellular machinery in diseases like cancer, are questions that have gripped me with a passion. My first academic love was for classical languages such as Latin and Greek, and curiously our work on the proteins that organize cellular behaviour has revealed a kind of molecular language through which cells communicate with one another. Proteins are the functional molecules that execute the instructions implicit in the DNA, and are responsible for building cells and tissues, and controlling their behaviour. They are the targets of most therapeutic drugs, and aberrations in their functions underlie disease. We now realize that proteins are built from smaller blocks, rather like a childfs building toy, many of which serve to link proteins one to another. This creates a communications network within the cell, through which it exchanges signals with its neighbours.
We have seen extraordinary advances in our understanding of the molecular basis for life, and we tend to think that we are deeply knowledgeable about human physiology and disease. But I would argue that we are still profoundly ignorant of how cells work; how living things work. The fun and excitement in biology is just starting. I believe that nothing is more important to us human beings than to know where we came from, and how we relate to the vast diversity of other species on the planet.
