Peter A. Lawrence awarded Developmental Biology-SDB Lifetime Achievement Award
By Marsha E. Lucas
Peter A. Lawrence
was awarded the 2011 Developmental Biology-SDB
Lifetime Achievement Award for his sustained
contributions to the field of developmental biology.
Lawrence, an investigator at the University of
Cambridge, Department of Zoology and emeritus
scientist at the Medical Research Council (MRC)
Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, has
spent his career studying pattern formation and how
cells achieve their identity during development.
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Peter Lawrence |
Lawrence has
received numerous scientific accolades including an
elected member of the European Molecular Biology
Organization, Fellow of the Royal Society, Fellow of
the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and a
recipient of the Waddington Medal from the British
Society for Developmental Biology. He expressed his
appreciation to the SDB for this award in an
interview in April.
“[It] was very nice of them,” he said. “I mean to be
[on] the same list as people like Joe Gall who I’ve
admired, it’s very satisfying.” He was particularly
appreciative of being recognized by a scientific
society outside of the U.K. Being honored by an
“organization in a big science country like the
U.S., it’s very nice. … I’m very grateful to them,”
he said.
Lawrence began his scientific career in 1962 as a
graduate student under renowned entomologist
Vincent Wigglesworth at the University of Cambridge. He then
spent two years as a postdoc in the United States at
the University of Virginia with
Dietrich Bodenstein
and Case Western Reserve University with
Howard Schneiderman. It was during this time that he made
the decision to study pattern formation—how you
build animals, shapes, and patterns. “I remember
making that decision on a plane actually when I was
coming back from America,” he said. “I had been
there since doing my postdoc and…it dawned on me
that that’s what I wanted to work on. And I think
it’s very, very useful for a scientist to have
a—what I call a target problem.” For Lawrence this
is a scientific question that you’d like to answer,
may never answer, but that drives your research
career.
Lawrence spent two years at the University of
Cambridge prior to being recruited to the MRC by
Francis Crick and Sydney Brenner in 1969 (Garwood,
2011). In 2006, he retired from the MRC and moved
his lab to the University of Cambridge where his
scientific career began decades before. For nearly
fifty years, Lawrence has tackled pattern formation
from many directions. He was instrumental in
clarifying Antonio Garcia-Bellido’s compartment
hypothesis determining the
role of engrailed in
establishing posterior compartment identity in
Drosophila embryonic body segments and adult
appendages. From his early days, Lawrence has
studied cell polarity in various insects to learn
how a cell knows to orient itself in one direction
over another. Much of this work has been done
examining hair and bristle growth along the Drosophila abdomen.
Over the years, Lawrence has maintained a small lab
with rarely more than one graduate student at a
time. Many postdocs have cycled through his
lab—several of whom have become long-term
collaborators including
Ginés Morata and
Gary Struhl.
Asked about his mentoring style, Lawrence said, “I
think that you should give your people as much
independence as they can take.” This was how he got
his start as a graduate student under Wigglesworth.
“I had to find my own project and work on it. I
relished that independence and freedom, and the
knowledge that whatever I did would be mine,” he
said. Like Wigglesworth, Lawrence does not put his
name on his students’ and postdocs’ papers unless he
has actually done some of the work. “...[W]hen I
started out, that was a more standard practice.”
Based on this belief system, Lawrence has continued
to work at the bench throughout his career. “...I
think that’s been good. I think I find that very
rewarding to be able to depend on your own work.”
For students and postdocs trying to make their way
in science, Lawrence said it is important for them
to be themselves. “... [P]eople often make a
mistake. They look at somebody who’s a very
successful scientist and use that person as a role
model and they try and do what that person is doing,
but they forget the most important part of the
equation is your own characteristics and what you’re
good at.”
“...I think it’s important to do what you’re good
at,” he said. “I mainly like microscopy. I don’t
like anything that’s too intellectually demanding,
so I tend to leave the detailed model building to my
colleagues...” Lawrence also doesn’t do molecular
biology as he finds pipetting quite boring. “I’ve
resolved that problem by collaborating with other
people who do molecular biology—like Gary Struhl,”
he said.
His appreciation for microscopy was inspired by a
book Wigglesworth wrote called The Control of Growth
and Form (1959). “It was a beautiful book and it
made me realize that you could learn a lot just by
looking at a whole mount,” he said. “Even now I’m
still marveled at the cuticle of the abdomen of
Drosophila.”
Former SDB President Richard Harland said Lawrence’s
lectures greatly influenced him as a graduate
student at the MRC. Lawrence’s “clarity of thinking
and criticism at the second floor cell and
developmental biology meetings” had an impact on his
career.
In the past 10 years, Lawrence has written many
commentaries on ethics, the responsibilities of
scientists in society, and critiques on the current
research system (see Garwood, 2011 for overview). He
began to speak out on these social aspects of
scientific research in response to feedback he
received following a lecture he gave honoring his
mentor, Vincent Wigglesworth. In it, he not only
spoke of Wigglesworth’s science, but “how he used
his life to advance knowledge.”
The response from students was tremendous and he
thought, “Perhaps there’s a need for somebody to
speak for the young people and the situation that
they find themselves in as they start working in a
career in science,” he said. Lawrence continues to
speak out on these social issues, but he said, “My
number one interest has always been the biology.”
Garwood, J. (2011).
The Heart of Research is Sick. Lab Times, (2) 24-31.
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