The hardest thing for me was getting people to buy into the idea... why would you want to inhibit DNA repair?
- Steve Jackson
If you’re based at the Wellcome Trust/Cancer Research UK Gurdon Institute, however, the common sense approach is not necessarily the road most travelled – and for good reason. The word ‘counterintuitive’ is one you will hear surprisingly often when you talk to its researchers about their work.
No one illustrates this better than Professor Steve Jackson, who has been at the Institute since it opened 25 years ago and made his name – and a new class of cancer drug – from a seemingly counterintuitive approach to cancer: to switch off a mechanism that is meant to repair our DNA and prevent it mutating, akin to taking out your army medics.
Jackson, like all of the researchers at the Gurdon, is a basic scientist – in other words, his work looks at the fundamental biology that underpins how our bodies work. Basic science is rarely fashionable, rarely flashy, but without it we would have few of the medicines we take for granted today.
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Image Credit: The District
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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