Background
Stephen West was born on 11 April 1952 in North Ferriby, Yorkshire, to Joseph Clair West, a fishbuyer, and Louise W.
Stephen West was born on 11 April 1952 in North Ferriby, Yorkshire, to Joseph Clair West, a fishbuyer, and Louise W.
He graduated with a Bachelor of Science in 1974 and stayed in Newcastle to carry out his Doctor of Philosophy with Peter Emmerson. During his Doctor of Philosophy work, he became interested in how cells recombine their deoxyribonucleic acid and use recombination for deoxyribonucleic acid repair.
He is known for pioneering studies on homologous recombination, and for defining the links between recombinational repair and genome instability diseases including cancer. He currently works at the London Research Institute’s laboratories at Clare Hall in South Mimms, Hertfordshire. He was an undistinguished student from a working class background, but did well enough at his local school (Hessle High) to be able to go on to study biochemistry at Newcastle University.
In 1977 he showed that ‘protein X’ was the elusive RecA protein, which is essential for recombination in bacteria.
After finishing his Doctor of Philosophy, which he completed within three years, he moved to the United States in 1978 to join the group led by Paul Howard-Flanders at Yale University in New Haven. While there, he purified and characterized RecA protein, and in doing so discovered many key aspects relating to the ways in which cells mediate deoxyribonucleic acid-deoxyribonucleic acid interactions and strand exchange.
Parallel studies were carried out in the groups of Charles Radding (also at Yale) and Robert Lehman (Stanford University), providing the groundwork for our current understanding of the enzymatic mechanisms of recombination. In 1985, West moved back to England and established his own group at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund, now known as Cancer Research United Kingdom. There he continues his work on recombination and repair, discovering cellular enzymes that resolve deoxyribonucleic acid intermediates (East coli RuvC, South cerevisiae Yen1 and human GEN1) and making key contributions to our understanding of the cellular roles of tumour suppressor proteins such as BRCA2.
He has been awarded several medals and prizes, notably from the Royal Society, the Biochemical Society and the Genetics Society.
1995 Fellow of the Royal Society.
Royal Society.