The discovery of cyclin (I)

We invited Tom Humphreys to Cambridge in 1976, for an EMBO workshop on translational control; Tom worked on protein synthesis in sea urchin eggs. I lent him my yellow bicycle (in those days, you couldn't rent bikes in Cambridge) and we became friends. Tom was director of the Embryology Course at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), Woods Hole, and asked if I would like to teach there next summer. I was thrilled; ever since I heard Henry Borsook talk about it in 1965, I had wanted to study protein synthesis in sea urchin eggs, impossible in land-locked Cambridge. So with some trepidation, and knowing no embryology, I went to teach at the MBL in June 1977 and started to learn how to work with sea urchin eggs. Howy Jacobs came as my assistant. The course was extremely well set up for looking at early embryos, but almost completely lacking in equipment for molecular biology. No gel tanks, no Eppendorf tubes, no liquid nitrogen, no -80 ° freezers. It was an enjoyable summer, and I learned a lot about sea urchin eggs and their fertilization, but no serious molecular experiments were done. I returned to teach at the MBL in 1979, and this time could be more productive, being better prepared. I packed my suitcase full of Eppendorf tubes and tips from home, even a peristaltic pump and crucially, gel tanks, plates, combs, and silicone rubber gaskets. In those days, too, one could travel on planes with a polystyrene bucket full of dry ice and rabbit reticulocyte lysate; the agricultural inspectors were perfectly comfortable with rabbit blood. Ed Southern had the lab next door, Dennis Ballinger and I studied ribosome phosphorylation in response to fertilization, and Eric Rosenthai and Joan Ruderman discovered the striking changes in the pattern of protein synthesis that occurred when clam oocytes were fertilized. Andrew Murray was a student on the course, and John Gerhart gave a seminar on MPF, which he described largely from a biochemical perspective; here was the enzyme that catalyzed entry into mitosis, and it sounded temptingly (if challengingly) amenable to further study. But translational control was what I wanted to understand. Next summer I switched to the Physiology course, with Ken van Holde as Director, who invited people like Howard Schachman to lecture. It was a revelation to me that physical biochemistry could be so much fun. The physiologists encouraged more doing and less talking than the embryologists, and the course was also better equipped and funded. We set up a small crowded laboratory that was well organized for looking after sea urchins and running acrylamide gels. Andrew Murray