Robin Weiss wins the 2015 Marjory Stephenson Prize
01 April 2015
Robin Weiss, Emeritus Professor of Viral Oncology at University College London (UCL) has been awarded the Society’s 2015 Marjory Stephenson Prize. Robin was President of the Society between 2006 and 2009 and is recognised for his pioneering work on retroviruses, including the identification of CD4 as a co-receptor for HIV.
His prize lecture, What’s the host and what’s the microbe?, will be held at 12.10 today.
When did you first become aware of science?
I started to absorb natural history at an early age – I could name a tree from the shape of its branches in winter, or from the shape of its leaves in summer. I was clearly identified at school as ‘the boy who likes nature’ when I was invited to remove a garden spider from the classroom and put it back in the school grounds. The only phobia I have is of spiders, but this phobia wasn’t as large as the thought of being shamed in front of the class!
When did you consider a career in research?
That was towards the end of my undergraduate degree. It was 1961, and Peter Medawar, my professor at UCL, asked me what I intended to do when I graduated. He suggested that I think about working in research and pointed me in the direction of working as a lab assistant, before taking on a PhD.
I joined an MRC research group doing population studies in India. We spent six months there looking at genetic variation in plague rats that were living on naturally radioactive soil. It actually turned out to be an uninteresting project, but I learnt how to do field work and how to make very accurate measurements. I really got a taste for research after which I undertook a PhD.
Population genetics seems rather abstracted from what you do now. How did you make the move to virology?
I went to a lab that was doing cancer research, but my supervisor Michael Abercrombie was a famous developmental biologist. His suggestion for my PhD was to transform chicken embryo cells into malignant cells using an oncogenic (cancer causing) virus, known as Rous sarcoma virus, which is how I became acquainted with viruses.
You’re perhaps best known for your work on HIV. How did you become involved in researching the virus?
I got involved in HIV because of my work on endogenous retroviruses. They’re second cousins to HIV. Around 1980, I became Director of the Institute of Cancer Research; I wanted to keep my research going so I kept a small lab for myself and made the switch from chicken retroviruses to human ones. The first retrovirus that caused leukaemia in humans was discovered around the same time. In 1981, AIDS appeared, but the virus that caused it – HIV – wasn’t discovered until 1983. We started working on HIV in February 1984, which was early in the outbreak. I remember it because 1984 was a leap year and we got our first stock of the virus from the French researchers who’d discovered it on leap day – February 29. Ultimately, we developed the diagnostic kit that was used throughout Britain and the British Commonwealth. The kit detected the presence of anti-HIV antibodies in people’s blood; it was used to screen the blood donated to blood banks.
We also showed in 1984 that the CD4 molecule found on the surface of some immune cells was the docking molecule for HIV, and showed that a strange condition in East Africa known as ‘Slim Disease’ was actually HIV/AIDS, which was important, as it highlighted that the virus was not just affecting gay men in America.
There was a lot of misinformation surrounding HIV early in the outbreak. How was it working with the virus in this period?
We were a little scared working with it – it’s not as dangerous to handle as Ebola, for instance, but we didn’t know that at the time. What we were concerned about was testing ourselves – we really didn’t know if were getting infected ourselves and didn’t want to infect our partners. We used our own diagnostic test every six weeks to test our blood serum; it was always a rather tense afternoon when the results came through.
Have you ever sat back and wondered about the difference this diagnostic test made?
Well it made very little public impact, but I think it saved more lives than any other research I’ve done because it meant that blood donations could be screened, eliminating a potential source of infection.
How has the field of virology changed since you began working in it?
When I was working with Rous sarcoma virus I was mouth-pipetting liquid – that’s what we did! One thing I can say is that I’m a one-technique man, working with experimental viruses known as ‘pseudotypes’, which have the envelope of one virus, but the genome of another. That said, the discipline has changed so much, there are so many sophisticated molecular virology techniques. When I started there was no PCR – researchers had to grow viruses in live cells. That said, the basic ideas: understanding infection, understanding how viruses work as infectious agents, remain relevant.
What does winning this award mean to you?
Having been a member of the Society since 1968, when I was still a research student, I’m very loyal to the Society – even more so having been President. It makes me particularly proud to be recognised with the Marjory Stephenson Prize, as it is an award for career recognition.
If you had one piece of advice for someone early in their career, what would it be?
Research has to be fun; it’s a bonus if it’s potentially useful! We all hit on hard times as researchers, from the ‘PhD blues’ onwards. You can look back at your career and think it’s one smooth upward path, but that’s not the way that research goes. Perseverance and intelligence – to think of another way to approach a problem – is what you need. There’s nothing like the buzz of making a discovery, but training bright young scientists comes close!
Image: Professor Robin Weiss.