| Citation | Professor Laurence Hurst, Professor of Evolutionary Genetics, Department of Biology and Biochemistry, University of Bath
Hurst is a leading authority on evolution of genetic systems. He showed that the genetic code is adapted to minimize errors, synonymous mutations in mammals are under selection and gene order is non-random. He was first to recognize the impact of gene expression levels on protein evolution. Hurst spearheaded novel approaches to evolutionary genetics deriving fitness from underlying biochemistry to predict the outcome of laboratory models. This led to fundamental insights into causes of gene dispensability, dominance and variation in gene family size. Hurst, collaborating with cell biologists, identified the human-specific pluripotency gene network and discovered human naïve stem cells.
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