Researchers make important discovery about one of the key pigments of life

Researchers at the University of Kent have discovered a new way in which nature makes heme - the component that gives blood its colour and allows red blood cells to carry oxygen around the body.
Until now it was not known that heme, one of the key pigments of life, can be made from a related molecule called siroheme by some very unusual and unexpected chemical processes - a discovery that principal investigator Professor Martin Warren has described as being similar in importance and scale to the ‘transformation of the first electronic calculators into the modern mobile phone'...read more

Research Seminars

Seminars are held at 4pm on Mondays in Biosciences Lecture Theatre 1 unless otherwise stated. If you would like to meet the speaker during his/her visit please contact the host. More information

Wain Medal Lecture

Awarded annually in memory of Professor Louis Wain CBE, a former Honorary Professor of Chemistry at the University of Kent, the Wain Medal recognises the achievements of an outstanding young scientist working at the interface of biology and chemistry. The annual Wain Lecture is presented in a way that is accessible to scientists and non-scientists alike. The lecture will take place in Woolf Lecture Theatre from 17:00-18:00. More Information

Sir Tim Hunt

The cell cycle and cancer

Sir Tim Hunt won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2001 with Lee Hartwell and Paul Nurse. He discovered cyclins, key regulators of the cell cycle.

Sir Tim Hunt is a Principal Scientist at Cancer Research UK’s Clare
Hall Laboratories in South Mimms, Hertfordshire. He was born in 1943 and grew up in Oxford until he was 18 years old, when he moved to Cambridge to read Natural Sciences. He did his PhD in the Department of Biochemistry on “The Synthesis of Haemoglobin”.
He spent almost 30 years in Cambridge, mostly working on the control of protein synthesis, with spells in the USA. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 1968-70 and spent summers at the Marine Biological Laboratory: Woods Hole from 1977 until 1985 both teaching and doing research.
The lecture will be held in Rutherford Lecture Theatre1 from 18:00 More Information