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The strategy behind one of the most successful labs in the world

One UK institute has produced a dozen Nobel laureates and biomedical breakthroughs across the board. How does Cambridge’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology do it? Our study found out.
By
  1. Luka Gebel

    1. Luka Gebel is a PhD candidate at King’s College London and incoming assistant professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at the Global Business School for Health, University College London.

  2. Chander Velu

    1. Chander Velu is professor of innovation and economics at the Institute for Manufacturing, Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.

  3. Antonio Vidal-Puig

    1. Antonio Vidal-Puig is professor of molecular nutrition and metabolism at the Institute of Metabolic Science, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK.

John Kendrew with forest of model colour rods from the 1960s.

Biochemist John Kendrew working on a structural model of a protein at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK, in the 1960s. Credit: MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology

The Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge, UK, is a world leader in basic biology research. The lab’s list of breakthroughs is enviable, from the structure of DNA and proteins to genetic sequencing. Since its origins in the late 1940s, the institute — currently with around 700 staff members — has produced a dozen Nobel prizewinners, including DNA decipherers James Watson, Francis Crick and Fred Sanger. Four LMB scientists received their awards in the past 15 years: Venkatraman Ramakrishnan for determining the structure of ribosomes, Michael Levitt for computer models of chemical reactions, Richard Henderson for cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) and Gregory Winter for work on the evolution of antibodies (see Figure S1 in Supplementary information; SI). Between 2015 and 2019, more than one-third (36%) of the LMB’s output was in the top 10% of the world’s most-cited papers1.

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Nature 630, 813-816 (2024)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-02085-2

References

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Supplementary Information

  1. Supplementary figures, methodology, quotes and acknowledgements

Competing Interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

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