The University of York, which was at the time a fairly modern university, it had a sort of integrated biology course. So one spent several months wandering around seashores learning all the sort of various different animals and plants there were. It went from biochemistry to ecology. And I think I seem to remember finding most of it fairly boring, particularly all the sorts of dreadful practicals you had to do which didn’t work. I got very interested in theoretical biology and partly because York was good at that and so I did quite a lot of mathematical modeling and spent quite a lot of time just doing that on my own. Then there were one or two rather inspirational teachers. There was a very good teacher who taught molecular biology. So the very little molecular biology I learned at York I learned from one particular professor there. A guy called

Kim Nasmyth is the Head of the Biochemistry Department of the University of Oxford and the Whitley Professor of Biochemistry. He was educated in Great Britain and earned his Ph.D in Zoology from the University of Edinburgh. He did his postdoctoral studies in Ben Hall's labolatory in Seattle Washington. He spent one year at Cold spring Harbor Laboratories as a Robertson Fellow. He was the Director of the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Vienna (Austria). He is one of the discoverer of cohesin, protein complex which during cell division is crucial for faithful chromosome segregation.

Professor Nasmyth is a fellow of the Royal Society and Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has received many scientific honours, including the Max Perutz Prize, the Louis Jeantet Prize for Medicine and the Wittgenstein Prize and the Unilever Science Prize.

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