My biochemical journey from a Cambridge undergraduate to the discovery of phosphotyrosine

Abstract

The most notable moment in my career as a biochemist was the discovery of phosphotyrosine, a somewhat serendipitous finding that turned out to have some very important consequences, notably, in human cancer. My career as a biochemist which has spanned nearly 60 years, began when I was 16. At the time, I was in the sixth form at Felsted School, a boarding school in Essex England, and my biology master, David Sturdy, elected to teach me some extracurricular biochemistry, giving me one-on-one tutorials on glycolysis and the TCA cycle. These early biochemistry lessons turned out to be invaluable because I was able to regurgitate them to answer a question in the University of Cambridge scholarship exam in the autumn of 1960. As a result, I was lucky enough to be awarded an Exhibition at Gonville and Caius College, the college where my father had studied for a medical degree during World War II. When I arrived in Cambridge in October 1962 to read natural sciences (see Figure 1), it was a natural choice to take biochemistry as one of my three required first-year courses. The Part I biochemistry course was taught by a series of excellent lecturers, including Philip Randle (a prominent diabetes researcher who described the Randle Cycle), Brian Chappell (who discovered mitochondrial transporters) and Asher Korner (a pioneer of cell free systems to study protein synthesis). It quickly became clear that biochemistry was an exciting subject, and Brian Chappell, my biochemistry supervisor at Caius, made supervisions a lot of fun. I also took Part I courses in invertebrate zoology and, importantly, organic chemistry, which gave me insights into how the metabolites we were learning about in biochemistry worked as chemicals.