Leland H. Hartwell
Leland Harrison Lee Hartwell ( born October 30, 1939 in Los Angeles ), biochemist and cancer researcher, was director of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center at the University of Washington in Seattle.
In 2001, he shared with Tim Hunt and Paul M. Nurse the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of significant regulators of the process of cell division.
Life
Hartwell showed as a child keen interest in biology, combined with the desire for thorough understanding of the observed phenomena. As the first in his family, he began studying first physics but soon switched to biology. After graduating from the California Institute of Technology, he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at the Institute of Boris Magasinik, where he received his doctorate in 1964. His doctoral thesis was " Studies on the induction of histidase in Bacillus subtilis ."
After further research at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, he moved in 1965 to an assistant professorship at the University of California, Irvine, and in 1968 to the University of Washington in Seattle, where he took up a professorship in genetics in 1973. From 1997 to 2010 he was the Director of The Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.
Discoveries to the process of cell division
Hartwell decided shortly after his promotion to use genetic methods to study the mechanisms of cell division. Although he already at that time aspired applications of his findings to cancer, he chose yeast cells ( Saccharomyces cerevisiae) as the object, as the work with them was methodologically easier than with human cell cultures. Elegant, mutation experiments, he succeeded to identify a sequence of more than 100 genes that regulate cell division, called by him CDC genes ( "cell division cycle genes" ).
The sketched in the figure process of cell division is divided into four main phases G1 = growth of the cell, S = synthesis of DNA, G2 = duplication of DNA and M = mitosis or division into separate cells. Leland is to identify those responsible for the temporally coordinated processes over 100 CDC genes succeeded. One of these, CDC -28, is responsible for the start of cell division. Control is via various CDK molecules (CDK = cyclin dependent kinase ) and cyclins, were honored for their discovery of the other two in Physiology or Medicine Nobel Prize in 2001.
Notably, these mechanisms are largely independent of the type of organism. The enlightened on yeast cells control mechanisms are exactly the same as in human cells. For tumor diagnosis and therapy arise with the knowledge discovered by Leland new opportunities that are currently being investigated by many research groups worldwide.