Peter Lawrence (biologist)
| Peter Anthony Lawrence | |
|---|---|
| Born | 23 June 1941 |
| Institutions |
University of Cambridge Laboratory of Molecular Biology |
| Alma mater | St Catharine's College, Cambridge |
| Thesis | The determination and development of hairs and bristles in the milkweed bug (Oncopeltus fasciatus Dall) (1966) |
| Doctoral advisor | Vincent Wigglesworth |
| Known for | Work on Drosophila melanogaster |
| Notable awards |
Fellow of the Royal Society Harkness Fellowship Member of EMBO Prince of Asturias Prize (2007) |
| Spouse | Birgitta Haraldson |
|
Website making-of-a-fly www |
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Peter Anthony Lawrence FRS (born 23 June 1941) is a British developmental biologist at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology and the Zoology Department of the University of Cambridge. He was a staff scientist of the Medical Research Council from 1969 to 2006.
Lawrence was educated at Wennington School in Wetherby, and then at St Catharine's College, Cambridge on a Harkness Fellowship; he gained his doctorate as a student of Vincent Wigglesworth for work on Oncopeltus fasciatus (milkweed bug) He is a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization, a Fellow of the Royal Society, was awarded the Darwin Medal, a recipient of the Prince of Asturias Prize for scientific research and was elected a Foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 2000.
Lawrence's main discoveries lie in trying to understand what type of information is required to shape an animal and generate a pattern (such as on a butterfly wing or a fingerprint). He is the principal advocate of the idea that cells in a gradient of a morphogen develop according to their local concentration of the morphogen and that this mechanism is used to generate patterns of cells. Together with , he has helped establish the compartment theory first proposed by . In this hypothesis, a set of cells collectively builds a territory (or "compartment"), and only that territory, in the animal. As development proceeds, a "selector gene" switches on in a subset of this clone of cells, and the clone becomes divided into two sets of cells that construct two adjacent compartments. Much of the evidence for the theory comes from studies on the Drosophila fly wing.
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