Georgina Ferry interviews Matthew Freeman.
Matthew Freeman FRS joined the Dunn School as Professor of Pathology and head of department in 2013. He remembers meeting the Nobel-prizewinning immunologist Peter Medawar as a teenager, who told him 'Chemistry is dead, Physics is dying and Biology is the only science that’s worth pursuing.' Inspired by this, Freeman read Biochemistry at Oxford before going to Imperial College London to undertake a PhD in on the genetic control of the cell cycle in fruit flies, in a department that was one of the first to use recombinant DNA methods to clone genes. This led to a post-doc at the University of California at Berkeley, from which he returned in 1992 to set up his own lab at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, working on receptors that are critical to the development of the Drosophila eye. He remained at LMB for 21 years, for the last six as head of the Cell Biology Division. Since his move to head the Dunn School he has focused on encouraging collaboration between research groups, under an over-arching definition of pathology as ‘the cell biology that underlies human disease’. He is a trustee of the EP Abraham Research Fund.
