Peter Lawrence

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article does not cite any references or sources. (March 2007)
Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed.

Peter Lawrence ^[1] is a developmental biologist at the LMB and Zoology Department of Cambridge University. Born in 1941, he was educated at Wennington School and St Catherine's College, Cambridge, where he gained his doctorate as a student of Vincent Wigglesworth. He is a member of EMBO, a Fellow of the Royal Society, was awarded the Darwin Medal, a recipient of the Prince of Asturias Prize for scientific research and a Foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Lawrence's main discoveries lie in trying to understand what type of information is required to shape an animal and generate a pattern (such as on a butterfly wing or a fingerprint). He is the principal advocate of the idea that cells in a gradient of a morphogen develop according to their local concentration of the morphogen and that this mechanism is used to generate patterns of cells. There is much evidence now to support this view. Together with Ginés Morata, he has helped establish the compartment theory first proposed by Antonio Garcia-Bellido. In this hypothesis, a set of cells collectively builds a territory (or "compartment"), and only that territory, in the animal. As development proceeds, a "selector gene" switches on in a subset of this clone of cells, and the clone becomes divided into two sets of cells that construct two adjacent compartments. Much of the evidence for the theory comes from studies on the Drosophila fly wing.

For the last ten years he has been working, in collaboration with Gary Struhl ^[2], on the development of the adult abdomen of Drosophila, with the aim of understanding the design and construction of the epidermal patterns, particularly planar polarity and cell affinity.

Lawrence has written a book, The Making of a Fly, which explains how the body plans of flies and higher animals, like humans, are constructed. He edits the journal Development. He has written commentaries on the ethics of science practice

Lawrence is married to Birgitta Haraldson, clinical psychologist and expert on the autism spectrum. Lawrence is a passionate theatre goer and has introduced many young scientists to the London theatre.