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Peter Lawrence
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Peter Lawrence is a developmental biologist at the LMB and Zoology department of Cambridge University. Born in 1941, he was educated at Wennington School and St Catherine's College, Cambridge, where he gained his doctorate as a student of Vincent Wigglesworth. He is a member of EMBO, a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Lawrence's main discoveries lie in trying to understand what type of information is required to shape an animal and generate a pattern (such as on a butterfly wing or a fingerprint). He is the principal advocate of the idea that cells in a gradient of a morphogen develop according to their local concentration of the morphogen and that this mechanism is used to generate patterns of cells. There is much evidence now to support this view. Together with Gines Morata, he has helped establish the compartment theory first proposed by Antonio Garcia-Bellido. In this hypothesis, a set of cells collectively builds a territory (or "compartment"), and only that territory, in the animal. As development proceeds, a "selector gene" switches on in a subset of this clone of cells, and the clone becomes divided into two sets of cells that construct two adjacent compartments. Much of the evidence for the theory comes from studies on the Drosophila fly wing.
Lawrence has written a book, The Making of a Fly, which explains how the body plans of flies and higher animals, like humans, are constructed.