The study that won him the Nobel prize

Prof. Leland H. Hartwell, who turns 84 on October 30, along with Tim Hunt and Sir Paul Nurse won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2001 “for discoveries of key regulators of the cell cycle”.

The Nobel Prize website states: “From the beginning, organisms evolve from one cell, which divides and becomes new cells that in turn divide. Eventually different types of cells are formed with different roles. For an organism to function and develop normally, cell division has to occur at a suitable pace. Leland Hartwell has helped to show how the cell cycle is controlled. Through studies of yeast in 1971, Hartwell was able to identify hundreds of genes that govern cell division. He also showed that the cell cycle comes to a halt if the cell’s DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) is damaged.”

Referring to the work that won the Nobel Prize, Prof. Hartwell says that cell division is very fundamental to all of biology. When they began this work, very little was understood about the components of the cell that controlled cell division. They were able to identify many genes that participated in controlling cell division by using yeast cells as they were like human cells and wonderful to do genetics with. They also reproduced very rapidly.

For students interested in research careers, he says that what was wonderful about working with yeast was how rapidly one could do experiments – that made it really fun. “I recommend that those doing science consider the turnaround time – how long it takes to plan an experiment, do it and get a result. The shorter that is the more fun it is.”

When asked to detail how his findings over 20 years ago are still applicable with regard to the development of anti-cancer drugs, Prof. Hartwell said that many of them, what people call targeted drugs, are against proteins that participate in different steps of the cell cycle.

“We didn’t discover all of those. But the methods were useful for many people who identified many proteins that are being targeted for cancer patients. Interesting is that cancer is a disease of the cell cycle – cells make mutations and we arrange chromosomes and become very rapidly evolving. That’s at the basis of cancer,” he says, adding that understanding how the cells control the cycle and how it assures the accuracy of the cell cycle is also fundamental to understanding the basic aspects of cancer.