Nick Lane

Nick Lane (born 1967) is a British biochemist and writer. He is a professor of evolutionary biochemistry at University College London. His books have won several awards.

Career

After taking his first degree at Imperial College London, Nick Lane earned his PhD from the Royal Free Hospital Medical School in 1995 with a dissertation titled "In vivo studies of ischaemia-reperfusion injury in hypothermically stored rabbit renal autograft". He then worked as Medical Writer at Oxford Clinical Communications for a year before joining the medical multimedia company Medi Cine International as a writer. In 1999 he became strategic director at what was, by then, Adelphi Medi Cine, a post he held until 2002.

He became an Honorary Researcher at University College London in 1997, and an Honorary Reader in 2006. He was the first Provost's Venture Research Fellow there from 2009 to 2012. Since October 2013 he has been Reader in Evolutionary Biochemistry at UCL. He is the author of popular science books and many articles on the origin of life, hydrothermal vents, evolution, and cellular biology, among topics. He is the winner of the 2015 Biochemical Society Award and the 2016 Michael Faraday Prize.

Publications

His book, Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution, won the 2010 Royal Society Prize for Science Books. He appeared on In Our Time on BBC Radio 4 on 13 September 2012, when the topic of discussion was the cell, and again on 15 May 2014, when the topic was photosynthesis.

Books

Selected articles