Dr Leland Hartwell

Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle

Video on YouTube

Dr Sue Biggins interviews Dr Leland Hartwell.

Video published 2019-02-19

2020-09-16 only 2,340 views and one comment

Cell Division Cycle (CDC)

2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Define Cell Cycle Checkpoints:

Well, we tried to define it relatively clearly, as something which is needed to arrest division when something goes wrong

We certainly wondered that. And I think over the years, a lot more has been discovered.

And so… you know, one of the, I think, really fundamental principles about biology, that fascinates me, is the tremendous accuracy of biological processes. So, yeast cells lose a chromosome about once in 100,000 divisions. That’s remarkably precise and reproducible, especially when you watch mitosis and see the chromosomes jiggling around and everything. You wonder how they keep track of them. And I suspect that’s true for all kinds of cellular processes, that normally we can’t measure the accuracy because it is so accurate. And… and so the extent to which evolution has driven the accuracy of biological processes is really enormous. And it… I think it must mean that for most things that go on in biology, there’s the basic machinery, there are things which repair the basic machinery when it gets in trouble, and there are things that coordinate that repair with everything else that’s going on. And we probably only know the tip of the iceberg yet in terms of cell biology.