Kim Nasmyth: the universal truth

To Kim Nasmyth it is not surprising that Gregor Mendel, the father of genetics, was working in a monastery rather than in a laboratory. As he says, “Creativity is a bit like speciation: you need a little bit of isolation to do what nobody else is doing.” Perhaps this was in his mind when he decided 10 years ago to leave the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK, and join the new Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Vienna, then at the very edge of Western Europe. The IMP may no longer be as isolated scientifically as it was ten years ago but Nasmyth is still there and on Max Birnstiel’s retirement last year he was a natural choice to take over as Director. Kim Nasmyth has been studying the cell cycle in yeast for two decades. He chose yeast as an experimental organism because of the power of its genetics and the comparative ease of generating conditional mutants in its key genes. But studies of these mutants are only valuable for the light they shed on the wild-type. Nasmyth firmly believes that the wild-type has been selected by evolution and so has a purpose that can potentially be understood. The elucidation of purpose — Nasmyth terms the result a “universal truth” — is the goal of science. Students in his laboratory soon learn to have ready an answer to the inevitable question at lab seminars, “How will this help you to discover a ‘universal truth’?” Nasmyth’s interest in the cell cycle stems from his undergraduate days in the University of York and was nurtured during his doctoral studies with Murdoch Mitchison at the University of Edinburgh, where Paul Nurse was working as a postdoc. Mitchison impressed upon his students the importance of taking measurements “in real time” using synchronous yeast-cell cultures and this technique has been important throughout Nasmyth’s career. For his post-doc Nasmyth moved to Ben Hall’s group in Seattle, where he developed ways of cloning genes by complementation in yeast and, in collaboration with Steve Reed, cloned the CDC28 gene from the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisae. A lecture given by Ira Herskowitz on the phenomenon of mating-type switching in yeast sparked Nasmyth’s