Peter Lawrence (biologist)

Peter Anthony Lawrence FRS (born 23 June 1941) is a British developmental biologist at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology and the Zoology Department of the University of Cambridge.^[1] He was a staff scientist of the Medical Research Council from 1969 to 2006.

Career

Lawrence was educated at Wennington School in Wetherby, and then at St Catharine's College, Cambridge on a Harkness Fellowship; he gained his doctorate as a student of Vincent Wigglesworth. He married Birgitta Haraldson in 1971;^[2] his wife is a clinical psychologist and expert on the autism spectrum. He is a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization,^[3] a Fellow of the Royal Society, was awarded the Darwin Medal, a recipient of the Prince of Asturias Prize for scientific research and was elected a Foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 2000.

Discoveries

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. 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.^[4]

For the last ten years he has been working, in collaboration with Gary Struhl 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.^[5]

Publications

Lawrence wrote The Making of a Fly in 1992,^[6][2] which explains how the body plans of flies and higher animals, like humans, are constructed. The book received recognition in April 2011 when fellow biologist Michael Eisen discovered two booksellers were programatically setting increasingly higher prices for copies of the book on Amazon.com's used book market. The sellers eventually priced copies over $23 million before the feedback loop was broken.^{[7][8][9][10]}

Lawrence also edits the journal Development. He has written commentaries on the ethics of science practice,^[11] and collaborated with Mark Bretscher on the obituary of Francis Crick published in Current Biology.^[12]

External links

• [1] Review of "Francis Crick: Hunter of Life's Secrets" by Robert Olby (published 2009) in 'Current Biology'.

References

• Crick, F.; Lawrence, P. (1975). "Compartments and polyclones in insect development". Science 189 (4200): 340–347. Bibcode 1975Sci...189..340C. doi:10.1126/science.806966. PMID 806966.  edit
• Morata, G.; Lawrence, P. (1975). "Control of compartment development by the engrailed gene in Drosophila". Nature 255 (5510): 614–617. Bibcode 1975Natur.255..614M. doi:10.1038/255614a0. PMID 1134551.  edit
• Lawrence, P.; Struhl, G. (1996). "Morphogens, compartments, and pattern: Lessons from drosophila?". Cell 85 (7): 951–961. doi:10.1016/S0092-8674(00)81297-0. PMID 8674123.  edit
• John Finch; 'A Nobel Fellow On Every Floor', Medical Research Council 2008, 381 pp, ISBN 978-1840469-40-0.