Unfortunately Sir Tim Hunt will not be able to travel to Bulgaria due to a medical emergency and this event is now cancelled.
Welcome to the talk of a Nobel laureate in Medicine. Find out why the role of a researcher is not only to solve but also to seek for big scientific questions. Sir Tim Hunt’s talk will focus on the long way to the big discovery, full of unexpected results of experiments of various hypotheses.
For his Ph.D. in biochemistry at Cambridge University he researched the control of haemoglobin synthesis. He will explain how he arrived at this – it was an accident – and also where he pursued the subject. It took ten years, many interesting side roads, a lot of travel and a devastating fire to solve the problem of how the synthesis of haem was coordinated with the synthesis of globin. After that, it took another 7 years to find a really good new problem to work on until he noticed that a prominent protein, later called cyclin, disappeared just before fertilized sea urchin eggs divided for the first (and every subsequent) time. Finding out what this protein was, and what it did took another six or seven years of work, leading to the awarding of the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for him and his team.
The event will be in English without translation.
Presented in partnership with the Association of the Medical Students in Bulgaria - Sofia.