Nobel Laureate Unearths his Surprising Lineage

Robin McKie at the Guardian's The Observer says that Nobel laureate Paul Nurse made his "greatest genetic insight ... courtesy of a striking and unusual source: the US Department of Homeland Security." In 2007, Nurse's application for a green card was rejected because his parents' names weren't on his birth certificate, McKie says. In digging through old records, Nurse eventually learned that "the parents who had raised him were really his grandparents while his 'sister' Miriam was his birth mother," and that "the men and women who he believed were his nieces and nephews, they were actually half-brothers and half-sisters," McKie writes of the Nobel laureate's surprising discovery. Read more about Nurse's upbringing in the full Observer profile of the incoming Royal Society president and future UK Centre for Medical Research and Innovation's Scientific Planning committee chair, here.