Scientific Advisory Board
Jean-Marie Lehn (Nobel Laureate) received his bachelor's degree in chemistry from the University of Strasbourg in 1960. His research led to the fabrication of cage-like molecules that contain a cavity into which another chemical species of appropriate size and shape may be included, like a key fits into a lock. With this began his work on the chemical basis of "molecular recognition," which also plays a fundamental role in biological processes. His research broadened from molecular recognition towards the definition of supramolecular chemistry, covering also supramolecular catalysis and transport processes. It also extended to the elaboration of functional devices for supramolecular photonics, electronics, and ionics. Author of more than 700 scientific publications, Lehn received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1987 with Cram and Pedersen.
Professor Sir Aaron Klug O.M. F.R.S. (Nobel Laureate) was educated at the Universities of Witwatersrand, Cape Town and Cambridge. He was President of the Royal Society (1995-2000), is a member of the Order of Merit, a Foreign Associate of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and of the French Academy of Sciences, and has received many honorary degrees. He is an Honorary Fellow of Peterhouse and of Trinity College, Cambridge. His work has been on the interactions of proteins with nucleic acids and on the elucidation of the structures of large biological molecules and assemblies, including simple viruses and chromatin, by X-ray diffraction and electron microscopy, and the development of new methods for their study. In 1982, he was awarded the undivided Nobel Prize in Chemistry, “for his development of crystallographic electron microscopy and the structural elucidation of protein-nucleic acid complexes of biological importance.” His current work is on the practical application of zinc finger transcription factors which he discovered in 1985. As a result of his protein engineering studies, synthetic zinc finger proteins can now be targeted with high specificity and affinity to any gene and so intervene in gene expression. The biotech company Sangamo has obtained promising therapeutic results on a number of diseases, in particular the promotion of new blood vessel growth in arterial obstructive disease and the correction of diabetic neuropathy in phase 2 clinical trials.
Sir Richard J. Roberts, F.R.S. (Nobel Laureate) is a Research Director at New England Biolabs, Beverly, Massachusetts. He attended the University of Sheffield where he obtained a B.Sc. in chemistry in 1965 and a Ph.D. in organic chemistry in 1968. His postdoctoral research was carried out in Professor J.L. Strominger's laboratory at Harvard, where he studied the tRNAs that are involved in the biosynthesis of bacterial cell walls. From 1972 to 1992, Sir Richard was Assistant Director for Research at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, under Dr. J.D. Watson. He began work on the newly discovered Type II restriction enzymes in 1972 and in the next few years more than 100 such enzymes were discovered and characterized in Sir Richard's laboratory. Sir Richard has also been involved in studies of Adenovirus-2 beginning with studies of transcription that led to the discovery of split genes and mRNA splicing in 1977 (for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1993). A consuming interest at present is the semi-automatic identification of restriction enzyme and methylase genes within the GenBank database and the development of rapid methods to assay function. Already several new specificities have been found and it is clear that there are many more restriction enzyme genes in nature than had been previously suspected. During the 2008 Queen’s Birthday Honours, Sir Richard was bestowed Knight Bachelor for his services to molecular biology and UK science.
Sir Gregory Winter C.B.E. F.R.S. is joint Head of the Division of Protein and Nucleic Acids Chemistry (PNAC) of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB), succeeding Cesar Milstein as joint Head in 1994. His scientific career has almost entirely been based in Cambridge at this laboratory. Sir Gregory was born in 1951 and brought up in West Africa. He went to Trinity College Cambridge and graduated from Cambridge University in 1973. His Ph.D. work (under Brian S. Hartley -1976) and postdoctoral work (under George G. Brownlee -1980) included protein sequencing (aminoacyl tRNA synthetases) and nucleic acid sequencing (influenze virus). He is one of the pioneers of protein engineering, working in the early 1980s on the engineering of an enzyme (tyrosyl tRNA synthetase) in a major collaboration with Alan Fersht, and subsequently on the engineering of antibodies. In particular, he developed technologies for making humanized antibodies (by grafting hypervariable regions from rodent antibodies to human antibodies) and also for making human antibodies in bacteria (by use of antibody repertories and phage display technologies). A Founder and Director of Cambridge Antibody Technology (www.cambridgeantibody.com), he is now a Founder and Director of Domantis (www.domantis.com). His research group continues to be focused on protein and antibody engineering, and he is a Senior Editor of the journal Protein Engineering Design and Selection. Sir Gregory is a Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and in 2004 was knighted for services to Molecular Biology.
