As Professor Sir Philip Cohen gets ready to launch the Dundee Science Festival, Jack McKeown examines his career and gets to know the man thought of as one of Britain’s top scientists.
In 1971, Professor Sir Philip Cohen then just plain old Dr Philip Cohen arrived in Dundee. Over the decades since he has single-handedly developed a branch of science called protein phosphorylation.
Now, the drug market developed on the back of discoveries he made is worth £10 million a year. They include Gleevec, which has transformed a rapidly fatal form of leukaemia into a manageable disease.
Because of his work, many people are alive who would otherwise be dead. Does consideration of the momentous outcomes resulting from the discoveries he has made ever make him feel giddy?
“Giddy?” he exclaims. “Of course not. I’m just a scientist. What gets me going is the lab work, making little discoveries that slowly add up to a big discovery.
“Of course, the fact that drugs have been developed which have kept people alive is a heartening thing, but it’s the science part of it that I enjoy.”
As the city’s greatest living scientist, it’s fitting that Sir Philip should be patron of the Dundee Science Festival, which runs from November 1″“14. He’ll be kicking the festival off with a talk on Thursday.
“I don’t prepare for talks, I like to shoot from the hip,” he jests, before elaborating. “Actually, this will be a variation on a talk I gave in the Pacific north-west last April.
“It was the 90th birthday of my former mentor Edmund Fischer, who I worked with in Seattle for two years. I gave a straight scientific talk at his birthday and then a general talk to the public.”
Sir Philip will be telling his audience about drug targets in the 21st century.
“It’s very important to explain your research to the public. It’s easy to get bogged down in scientific jargon and technical terms, so you have to be careful to explain your research in simple terms that make sense to people. So next week I hope to give a flavour of how we go about solving problems, and how our research has helped develop treatments for diseases including cancer.”Early careerBorn in Middlesex in 1945, Sir Philip (65) went to University College London where he was awarded a BSc with first class honours in 1966 and a PhD in 1969.
He spent two years at the University of Washington before arriving at Dundee University, where he remains to this day. Since his arrival at the university, he has developed the College of Life Sciences from a converted stable block housing 11 scientists to an internationally renowned facility with 800 staff from 53 countries.
His research has been devoted to the role of protein phosphorylation in cell regulation and human disease, a process that controls almost all aspects of cell life. His contributions to this area include working out over a 25-year period how insulin stimulates the synthesis of glycogen in muscle.
A Royal Society Research Professor since 1984, he was knighted in the Queen’s birthday honours in 1998. Next to a keen and inquisitive mind, probably the most important attribute to have in Sir Philip’s field is patience.
“The timescales involved can be very long,” he says. “They are getting progressively shorter as technology advances, but developing scientific research takes time.
“As far as my own particular field is concerned, I started it in 1969 and continued since I came to Dundee in 1971. The first phone call I received from a pharmaceutical company was in 1994. So it took 23 years of work before the commercial world got interested.
“That’s why governments must be prepared to support basic fundamental research for a sustained period of time, because it may take years or even decades before a field of research reaches the stage of maturity where it becomes obvious how it can be used to improve health and create wealth.”
Waiting for his research to become commercial wasn’t nearly as frustrating as it sounds, he explains. “I wasn’t just sitting there for 23 years waiting for the phone to ring. I was busy doing research.Archimedean moment”The reason I got into this wasn’t to attract the attention of pharmaceutical companies though it’s nice when that happens it’s making the little research breakthroughs that I get excited about.”
The ancient Greek scholar Archimedes is reputed to have proclaimed “Eureka” upon stepping into the bath and realising the volume of water displaced must be exactly equal to the volume of his submerged body. Overjoyed that the volume of irregular objects could be measured with precision, he is said to have leapt from the water and run naked through the streets of Syracuse.
Few modern scientists have Archimedes moments, Sir Philip says. “Research isn’t about one instant breakthrough. Normally if you have one big idea that arrives whole and in one piece, it’s rather a shallow insight.
“The type of problems scientists are trying to solve these days are too big to just sit down and think through. Our brains don’t have the capacity to do that. Scientists work by carrying out experiments and analysing the results. After the results are analysed, they often raise new questions which are investigated through more experiments.
“I wrote an article about my life for the American Journal of Biological Chemistry. It was called Nibbling at the Edges. That’s what we as scientists do. We take little tiny bites from the edges of the problem, and the hope is that by nibbling away from all sides we will eventually get to the middle.”
One of the biggest changes over the course of Sir Philip’s career has been the rise of the computer.
“The gulf between the technologies we use today and those we used when I was starting out is vast. I spent 25 years working out how the hormone insulin works and when I look back on the technology we were using it seems very primitive.”
And the biggest discovery in the field of life sciences? “Unravelling the structure of the human genome is the blueprint for everything.”
Although Sir Philip argues science is no more complex than it ever was, there’s no doubting it’s becoming ever more specialised, which makes keeping non-scientific people abreast of developments increasingly difficult.
“One of the things I love about my area is it’s a very general area. I work with the biological mechanisms that regulate how all living cells control almost all of their functions. It allows me to keep a very general perspective. There are some areas where people are investigating minutiae of one tiny aspect of science. I’ve always enjoyed being able to move from one field to another.
“After solving how insulin works I’ve moved on to quite a different problem of how the body’s immune system regulates viruses. Each cell in our bodies contains hundreds of thousands of parts. If just one of those parts goes wrong we can become ill.
“What’s amazing isn’t that we do sometimes get unwell, it’s just how seldom things do go wrong. Given the complexity of it all, it really is a wonder we last more than a few days.”
The 20th century was an era where our knowledge of ourselves and the world we live in expanded at a pace never seen before. Does Sir Philip expect such a rate of discovery to continue? “I think the last 50 years have been the scientific golden age. I think we’re now entering the applied age.
“The last 50 years were all about finding things out and discovering theories. The next 50 years will be all about applying the ideas we’ve had over the last 50 for the creation of wealth and the improvement of health.”Professor Sir Philip Cohen will be launching the Dundee Science Festival with a talk on Thursday (October 28). Discovery of New Drug Targets for the Treatment of Disease in the 21st Century, takes place at the University of Dundee’s Dalhousie Building from 6-7pm, followed by a wine reception. Admission is free and does not need to be booked in advance. Dundee Science Festival runs from November 1″“14. The website dundeesciencefestival.org has more information for anyone interested.