Twenty-two years ago, I was in a room in London talking about setting up a museum to celebrate the monk Gregor Mendel, the founder of genetics. Someone came in and gave me a note from my lab saying I should turn on my mobile phone. A heavily distorted message had been left, and it sounded like a journalist asking me for comments on the Nobel prize in medicine, which he said had been awarded that day to my friend Tim Hunt. I listened to it again and then a third time. Was he also saying I had won it too? I returned to the room and said something that in retrospect must have sounded very strange: “I must go now because I think I may have won a Nobel prize.” It was true, I had won it, together with Tim and Leland Hartwell, a scientist from Seattle, for our work on how cells control their division.
The prize changed our lives. It is the one scientific prize everyone knows. Suddenly you become a public figure being asked to do all sorts of things: to give lectures, quite often on topics you know little about; to sit on committees and reviews you are not always well qualified to be on; to visit countries you have barely heard of; to sign endless petitions on what are probably good causes, but you never know. It is like having a whole new extra job, with upwards of 500 requests a year. It is impostor syndrome on steroids.
