Paul Nurse is one of the UK's foremost biological scientists and was made a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) for his work on the genes that regulate the cell division cycle. This is the process that takes a fertilised egg from a tiny single cell to the 100,000 billion cells that make up an adult human, or an accidental mutation that leads to a cancer tumour.

In 2001, he received the Nobel Prize for medicine (jointly with Dr Tim Hunt and Dr Leland Hartwell) for his work on cell division. He is due to take up a new position as President of the Rockefeller University in New York.