Making a grade: Sonic Hedgehog signalling and the control of neural cell fate

My grandfather once told me that you should never do anything that might win you a medal. This advice came from his time in the military and although he was a man whose opinion I respected greatly, this was one piece of advice that I never thought would be relevant to me as a scientist. In my defence, it was never my intention or ambition to win a medal: no one could have been more surprised and delighted than I was when I received the email from EMBO informing me that I had won the Gold Medal. Indeed, looking back, I can honestly say it was never my intention or ambition to become a research scientist. Although one or two of my current colleagues appear to have had wellstructured career plans before they could walk, read or say ‘tenure committee decision’ I did not. Similar to many scientists I suspect, I accidentally fell into research. I enjoyed and did reasonably well in science classes at school, so it was obvious to choose a science subject when thinking about university. I ended up at Warwick University studying Microbiology and Virology, a course that involved a great deal of molecular biology. The elegance and complexity of bacterial and viral life and the way in which studying these organisms at a molecular level seemed to resolve the complexity to simple, straightforward explanations of function captivated me. An intercalated year spent working at Amersham International in Cardiff (now GE Healthcare) reinforced this view and whetted my appetite for some proper research. Back at Warwick for my final year, I was particularly struck by how much had been learned about the mechanism at work in eukaryotic cells from the study of viruses and viral infections. Signalling, the start