Note: these thumbnail biographies do not include all the people mentioned in this book, but are intended as an aide-memoire to some key players whose names appear frequently and sometimes out of context.
EVAN, GERARD
A scientist with Cancer Research UK (CRUK), now based at Cambridge University as Professor of Biochemistry. An early enthusiast for the use of mouse models to find out how things work in living organisms, he is renowned as an original thinker whose work frequently challenges mainstream thinking. We meet him first in Chapter 1, making the provocative comments about the rarity of cancer.
HAINAUT, PIERRE
Based at the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in Lyon, France, for many years, Hainaut ran the mutant p53 database – a detailed record of all the different mutants appearing in the literature and how they behave. A natural-born detective, he has a special interest in tracing the distribution and pattern of disease caused by mutant p53 among people throughout the world.
HALL, PETER
A Professor of Pathology and close colleague of one of p53’s discoverers, David Lane, at Dundee University, Scotland, in the 1990s. p53 has been one of Hall’s main research interests. Especially renowned for the maverick experiment he cooked up with Lane in a Dundee pub to test the effects of radiation on p53 in living organisms.
KNUDSON, ALFRED
The US-based cancer geneticist who first hypothesised the presence in our cells of genes whose job is to protect us from cancer. The ‘two-hit’ hypothesis of 1971, which grew out of Knudson’s work with children with the eye tumour retinoblastoma, changed forever the way in which cancer biologists viewed the process of tumour formation.
LANE, DAVID
A central character in the story of p53 as one of four people who, working entirely independently, discovered the gene in 1979. Lane was then at the ICRF (Imperial Cancer Research Fund, now known as Cancer Research UK) in London. At Dundee University in the 1990s, he built one of the largest communities of scientists working on p53 anywhere in the world. Responsible, among many other things, for dubbing p53 ‘Guardian of the Genome’.
LEVINE, ARNIE
The Princeton-based scientist who discovered p53 independently but at the same time as David Lane and two others in 1979. Levine’s lab has been a hub of p53 research ever since and has been involved in many of the most important discoveries about the function of the gene.
OREN, MOSHE
One of the first people, in 1984, to make a clone – an exact replica – of p53 from which endless copies could be made for research. Among many other important contributions to the field, Oren also discovered p53’s role in apoptosis (cell suicide) and, along with Arnie Levine and Carol Prives, helped to uncover the mechanism that keeps the powerful p53 under strict control in our cells.
PRIVES, CAROL
A Columbia University-based scientist who, in collaboration with Bert Vogelstein, discovered that p53 works as a master switch in our cells, turning other genes on and off in response to signals. Involved also, along with Moshe Oren and Arnie Levine, in discovering the mechanism that keeps the powerful p53 itself under strict control in our cells. Prives is among a number of key researchers at the core of the p53 community.
ROTTER, VARDA
Based at the Weizmann Institute in Israel, Rotter was one of the earliest researchers to recognise that p53, when mutated, does not simply lose the ability to function as a tumour suppressor; very often the mutant acts to promote the growth of a tumour. Rotter is famed for having stuck to her guns, even when her analysis was challenged by some of the best brains in the community, and today hers is the mainstream view.
VOGELSTEIN, BERT
Trained as a medical doctor at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, Vogelstein’s experience treating children with cancer led him to molecular-biology research. The first person to investigate p53 in human cancers, he has been involved in many key discoveries about the function of the gene, including its role as a tumour suppressor and a master switch.
WEINBERG, ROBERT
Eminent US scientist involved since the early days of the molecular-biology revolution in uncovering the genetic basis of cancer. Best known for his discoveries of the first human oncogene (or cancer-promoting gene) and the first tumour suppressor. Weinberg has spent most of his working life at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and is the author, with Doug Hanahan, of a seminal paper, ‘The Hallmarks of Cancer’, which defines the key characteristics of all cancer cells.
WYLLIE, ANDREW
Trained as a pathologist, Wyllie was a PhD student at Aberdeen University in Scotland when ‘programmed cell death’, or cell suicide, emerged from rarefied fields into mainstream biology and was given the name ‘apoptosis’. His was one of two groups of researchers who simultaneously discovered that apoptosis is one of the programmes p53 is able to trigger in response to cellular stress in real life, not just in cell cultures in Petri dishes.