Sir Paul Nurse: 'The UK has taken a leap several decades into the past'

The Nobel prize-winning scientist on Covid-19, the burden of Brexit, his astonishing upbringing and terrible failures at French

Sir Paul Nurse is a geneticist who won the Nobel prize in 2001 for his work on the cell cycle. He is director of the Francis Crick Institute and was head of Cancer Research UK. He has also been president of the Royal Society. What Is Life? is his first book and it seeks to explain biology in five steps.

Your book is a reminder of the fundamental importance of cells. Do you think cells have been overshadowed by genes in the public imagination?
I'm a geneticist, so I've lived through molecular genetics and molecular biology and that has focused a lot on genes. I do think cells have not caught the attention of the world in perhaps the way they should have done, because it's the fundamental unit of life. I sometimes use this analogy: it's like biology's atom. It's not the gene, it's the cell.