Indian science has always been a global front runner

Widely regarded as one of the greatest modern scientists, geneticist and Nobel laureate Sir Paul Nurse spoke to HT about India's research landscape, impact of budget cuts on the future of research, and his work that led to him winning the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2001.

- Rhythma Kaul

NEW DELHI: Edited excerpts:

Tell us a bit about your research?

What I work on is cells. We're all made of billions of cells. I work on the process called the cell cycle by which a cell reproduces itself from one to two. That requires a series of events: Events that particularly lead to the doubling of the DNA and the segregation/separation into two newly divided cells.

What controls that overall process, what goes through all those events in the right order, and the impact that led to the Nobel Prize was the discovery that it's a very simple system: There's a particular enzyme called cyclin-dependent kinases, which increases as you go through the cycle and fires off different events at different levels. And then when it gets to the end of the cycle, it's destroyed and then it goes through it again.

It's very important—this cell cycle—because it underpins the growth and reproduction of all living things. We all came from a single cell and you wouldn't exist if it hadn't undergone all of this properly, and it has some relevance to cancer.

Why do you think cancer incidence is rising so sharply globally?

I'm not actually a cancer specialist, but it is a bit strange. The usual answer, which I'm not sure is completely correct, is to say we get older, we survive other diseases—particularly infectious diseases—which we've managed to control. And that has meant that there's a greater incidence of cancer.