Peter Anthony Lawrence
Peter Anthony Lawrence is a British developmental biologist and geneticist . He was a staff scientist of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology from 1969 to 2006 and has worked in the of the University of Cambridge from 2006 to present.
Education
Lawrence was educated at Wennington School in Wetherby, and then at St Catharine's College, Cambridge; he gained his doctorate as a student of Vincent Wigglesworth for work on Oncopeltus fasciatus. His postdoc in the USA was funded by a Harkness Fellowship.Career and research
Lawrence's main discoveries lie in trying to understand the information that shapes an animal or generates a pattern. He is a principal advocate of the theory that cells in a gradient of a morphogen each develop according to the local concentration of that morphogen and that this mechanism thereby patterns fields of cells. Together with Ginés Morata, he has helped establish the compartment theory. Under this hypothesis a set of cells collectively builds a precisely defined territory in the animal. As development proceeds, a selector gene switches on in a subset of these cells thus dividing the set into two, all the progeny of each set construct one of the two adjacent compartments. Much of the evidence for the hypothesis comes from studies on the abdomen of Oncopeltus and the Drosophila fly wing.Since the mid 1990s he has collaborated with José Casal, Gary Struhl, and others to study Planar Cell Polarity and cell affinity. PCP is a common property of cells which can show coordinated polarity in the plane of the epithelia. PCP is often revealed by the consistent orientation of visible structures such as cuticular bristles in insects or hairs in mammals. Using the powerful genetics of Drosophila, particularly the ability to make genetic mosaics, Lawrence and his colleagues provided evidence that there are two separate molecular/genetic systems that build PCP. At the heart of each system is a gradient of a molecule that extends across the tissue. The local slopes of these gradients are detected by means of molecules that form intercellular bridges and are used to orient PCP in each cell.
Casal, Lawrence and their group have now demonstrated and measured the two molecular gradients in vivo.
His research was funded by the Medical Research Council, the Wellcome Trust and the Leverhulme Trust.
Publications
are also listed in his personal web site.Lawrence wrote the book The Making of a Fly in 1992, which explains how the body plans of flies are constructed. Findings on the fly have strong implications for other animals such as mammals.
The book received further "recognition" in April 2011 when fellow biologist Michael Eisen discovered two booksellers were programmatically setting increasingly higher prices for copies of the book on amazon.com used book market. Margrethe Vestager mentioned this event as an early example of algorithmic tacit collusion on March 16, 2017. The sellers eventually priced copies over 23 million USD before the feedback loop was broken.
Lawrence has also written many commentaries on the ethics of science practice, as well as obituaries of Michael Berridge, Sydney Brenner, Francis Crick, and Ed Lewis.