It's terribly important that you can criticise people's ideas without criticising them, and if they burst into tears, it means that you tend to hold back from getting at the absolute truth.
In 1968, I left Cambridge and went to work in New York with Irving M. London, who was then the chairman of the Department of Medicine at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.
The idea was to study fertilization in as many different phyla and organisms as possible, using the simplest possible equipment and a microscope. Biochemical approaches were not much in vogue, and running gels impossible at first.
'Eureka' moments are very, very rare in my experience. It normally takes several weeks of experiments to tease out the truth, even when you have a really pretty good idea of what is going on.
The best meeting I ever went to was a meeting in France where the talk slots were 60 minutes long, but you were told to prepare a five-minute talk. It was absolutely great because the entire talk was a conversation between the speaker and the audience.
My education started with Latin taught at home by a governess, I can't imagine why, and for some reason I attended the Infants Department of the Oxford High School for Girls before moving to the Dragon School at the dangerous age of 8 or so.
You don't want to inhibit cell division. You want to inhibit cell division in the cancer cells, and even that is not really where you want to do it. You actually want to destroy the cancer cells, which is a different matter altogether. Just stopping them isn't enough - you really want to kill them.
I was born in 1943 at Neston in the Wirral, not far from Liverpool where my father, Richard William Hunt was a lecturer in paleography, the study of mediaeval manuscripts.
In the fall of 1961, I went up to Clare College Cambridge to read Natural Sciences, with the intention of becoming a biochemist in the end.
My introduction to cell cycle control was provided by a clear, scholarly and beautiful seminar given by John Gerhart one afternoon in the summer of 1979.
