Journeys of Discovery

Failed experiments as a student didn’t deter him - Azim Surani has spent his entire career trying to understand early mammalian development. This year marks the 40th anniversary of his discovery of genomic imprinting - the process in which specific genes are tagged, turning them on or off at the very earliest stage of life. Surani has transformed scientific understanding of the different contributions of maternal and paternal genes to development in mammals, and how these genes are regulated. The resulting field of epigenetics has now exploded - and his discovery holds wide-ranging potential, from treating human disease to saving endangered species. Professor Azim Surani, Director of Germline and Epigenetics Research at the Gurdon Institute, University of Cambridge tells us about his journey of discovery. Find out more here -

The drug olaparib has now been used to treat over 140,000 patients globally, changing the outlook for people with breast, ovarian, prostate and pancreatic cancers. Professor Sir Steve Jackson talks about chance, risk, curiosity and shots-on-goal in the journey of his discovery. Find out more here:

Sitting in a field strung with 120 miles of radio telescope antennae, 24-year old Cambridge PhD student Jocelyn Bell couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d seen something before. The year was 1967. For two years, Jocelyn had helped solder and sledgehammer the antennae into place at the Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory just outside Cambridge. As she pored over her rolls of chart recordings, she noticed it again: a bit of "scruff", a “one part in 10 million” squiggle on a line. She had discovered pulsars, a previously unknown object in the universe. The work resulted in a Nobel Prize (controversially, not to her), inspired the artwork on a Joy Division album cover, and led her to donate all of a £2.3 million prize to help underrepresented groups become physicists. We talk to Jocelyn about her journey of discovery. Read more:

Shankar Balasubramanian’s diary records 26 August 1997 as the day of “The Solexa Idea!” Sitting in the beer garden of the Panton Arms in Cambridge, he and David Klenerman sketched out their plans to watch DNA polymerase as it assembled the building blocks of life. Their ideas were progressing fast – and with them, something even more exciting. They realised that if they could watch the enzyme copying a genome then they were inadvertently also reading the genome. They had discovered a radically new way to sequence DNA that would be fast, accurate, low-cost and scalable. To make the technology more broadly available to the world, in 1998 they co-founded the company Solexa, which was acquired by Illumina in 2007. Today, rapid genome sequencing brings huge benefits to society. Coronavirus is tracked worldwide, diseases are diagnosed, crops are improved, and new therapies and vaccines are developed. We talk to the inventors about their journey of discovery. Read more: