Briefly in education

-- Deirdre Newman

A recipient of the 2001 Nobel Prize in medicine started his academic

career at UC Irvine.

Leland H. Hartwell received the prize for yeast experiments that he

began in 1970.

Hartwell was one of the founding faculty members in UCI’s Department

of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry in 1965, the year the school

opened.

It was here that Hartwell became a pioneer in the field of cell cycle

research, which was considered radical at the time because only a few

researchers used yeast in their work. Hartwell used yeast mutants to

identify genes that control protein synthesis and other cellular

processes.

Hartwell has since discovered more than 100 genes involved in

controlling the cell cycle, which has a significant effect on cancer

research.

Hartwell is director of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in

Seattle. He shared the Nobel Prize with R. Timothy Hunt and Paul M.

Nurse, both of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund in Great Britain.