Tim Hunt

“My introduction to cell cycle control was provided by a clear, scholarly and beautiful seminar given by John Gerhart one afternoon in the summer of 1979.”

“At the age of 14, I moved across town to Magdalen College School, Oxford, where science played a much larger role in the curriculum.”

“You don't want to inhibit cell division. You want to inhibit cell division in the cancer cells, and even that is not really where you want to do it. You actually want to destroy the cancer cells, which is a different matter altogether. Just stopping them isn't enough - you really want to kill them.”

“I did not know that I can win the Nobel Prize.”

“My education started with Latin taught at home by a governess, I can't imagine why, and for some reason I attended the Infants Department of the Oxford High School for Girls before moving to the Dragon School at the dangerous age of 8 or so.”

“Winning a Nobel Prize isn't about being clever at all. It's about making... at least in physiology or medicine, it's about making discoveries, and you don't have to be clever to make a discovery, I don't think; it just comes up and punches you on the nose.”

“I am extremely sorry for the remarks made during the recent Women in Science lunch at the world conference of science journalists in Seoul, Korea.”

“The best meeting I ever went to was a meeting in France where the talk slots were 60 minutes long, but you were told to prepare a five-minute talk. It was absolutely great because the entire talk was a conversation between the speaker and the audience.”

“I am interested in how cells know what they are and how they should behave in their proper place in the body.”