Sir Thomas Leon Blundell, (born 7 July 1942) is a British biochemist, structural biologist, and science administrator. He was a member of the team of Dorothy Hodgkin that solved in 1969 the first structure of a protein hormone, insulin. Blundell has made contributions to the structural biology of polypeptide hormones, growth factors, receptor activation, signal transduction, and DNA double-strand break repair, subjects important in cancer, tuberculosis, and familial diseases. He has developed software for protein modelling and understanding the effects of mutations on protein function, leading to new approaches to structure-guided and Fragment-based lead discovery. In 1999 he co-founded the oncology company Astex Therapeutics, which has moved ten drugs into clinical trials. Blundell has played central roles in restructuring British research councils and, as President of the UK Science Council, in developing professionalism in the practice of science.
Education
Born in Brighton in 1942, Blundell was educated at Steyning Grammar School. He was the first in his family to attend university, winning an Open Scholarship to the University of Oxford. He earned a First Class degree in Natural Sciences in 1964, then moved to research in the Department of Chemical Crystallography, first with Herbert Marcus Powell FRS for his Doctor of Philosophy degree and later working on insulin with Dorothy Hodgkin. He was a Junior Research Fellow at Linacre College, University of Oxford, where he is now an Honorary Fellow.
Career and research
Blundell's early posts were at the University of Oxford and the University of Sussex. In 1976, Blundell joined the Department of Crystallography at Birkbeck, University of London, becoming head of department in 1978.
In 1991, while continuing academic research, he moved further into science administration and policy, as Director General of the Agricultural and Food Research Council (1991–94) and then the founding Chief Executive of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) (1994–1996). He is a former president of the Biosciences Federation (2004–06). In June 2011 he became President of the Science Council.
In 1995 he became the fifth Sir William Dunn Professor of Biochemistry and head of the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Cambridge; he currently also holds the Chair of the School of Biological Sciences at that university. He is a fellow of Sidney Sussex College. His speciality is molecular biology and his research on identifying the chemical processes of diseases has led to the development of drugs to treat Aids, cancer, cataracts and diabetes. He is the co-founder of two drug discovery companies, Astex Technology Ltd and Biofabrika.
On 15 September 2010, Blundell, along with 54 other public figures, signed an open letter published in The Guardian, stating their opposition to Pope Benedict XVI's state visit to the UK.
Blundell has been active on environmental issues, first as Chair of the Planning Committee of the Oxford City Council (1970–73), during the time when it stopped the building of a motorway through the city centre, pedestrianised much of the historic centre, and made North Oxford a conservation area. From 1998 to 2005 he was Chair of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, when he oversaw the production of key reports such as those on Energy – the Changing Climate, Chemicals in Products – Safeguarding the Environment and Human Health, and Turning the Tide: Addressing the Impact of Fisheries on the Marine Environment. He is a Distinguished Member of Humanists UK.