On the road to replication

Abstract

EMBO Mol Med (2016) 8: 77–79OpenUrlFREE Full TextI had left New York a few days earlier—Halloween 1990—to start my new research group at the ICRF Clare Hall laboratories. It was Guy Fawkes Night at Clare Hall, which is located in the rural village of South Mimms just north of London. Guy Fawkes was a 17th century religious zealot who tried unsuccessfully to blow up the Houses of Parliament; he was captured, tortured, and executed, events which are celebrated in Britain every November 5th with fireworks and bonfires. I was standing in a soggy field, feet soaking wet and freezing in the drizzling rain, eating a cold sausage, and watching my new colleagues burn an effigy of our laboratory manager, Frank Fitzjohn, on the bonfire. I had clearly arrived in a foreign land!At the time of my hiring, I was given the choice of the Clare Hall laboratories or the Lincoln's Inn Fields laboratories in central London. With LIF's reputation for cutting‐edge cancer research, and having lived in another big city, New York, for most of my life, friends and colleagues had expected me to choose LIF. Clare Hall was not yet the internationally recognised powerhouse of genome stability research it later became, but it was clear to me that I had found a home amongst a group of outstanding young biochemists including Rick Wood and Steve West. Soon Tim Hunt, Julian Blow, and Noel Lowndes joined the faculty, generating a vibrant atmosphere for cell cycle research. And, under the direction of Tomas Lindahl, the future of Clare Hall seemed very bright.I had come to Clare Hall straight from a postdoc in Bruce Stillman's laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor. When I first arrived in Bruce's laboratory, he had just embarked on a major project to dissect cell …