Lionel Vivian Crawford FRS

Royal Society

The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, known simply as the Royal Society, is a learned society for science, and is possibly the oldest such society in existence. Founded in November 1660, it was granted a Royal Charter by King Charles II as the "Royal Society of London"...

 FRSE

Royal Society of Edinburgh

The Royal Society of Edinburgh is Scotland's national academy of science and letters. It is a registered charity, operating on a wholly independent and non-party-political basis and providing public benefit throughout Scotland...

 is a British cancer expert and virologist.

He was educated at Rendcomb College

Rendcomb College

Rendcomb College is a co-educational boarding and day school for 3 to 18-year-olds, located in the village of Rendcomb five miles north of Cirencester in Gloucestershire, England. The school is a member of the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference....

 between 1941 and 1950 before being called up for National Service

Conscription in the United Kingdom

Conscription in the United Kingdom has existed for two periods in modern times. The first was from 1916 to 1919, the second was from 1939 to 1960, with the last conscripted soldiers leaving the service in 1963...

. After demobilization in 1952 he studied at Emmanuel College, Cambridge

Emmanuel College, Cambridge

Emmanuel College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge.The college was founded in 1584 by Sir Walter Mildmay on the site of a Dominican friary...

 with a State Scholarship

State Scholarship (UK)

A State Scholarship was a financial scholarship award for university entrants based on Scholarship Level exam results. Although the award was based on exam performance, the amount received was means-tested.-History:...

, graduating with a first class degree in Botany, Zoology, Organic Chemistry and Biology in 1955. after graduate work at the Cambridge Department of Chemical Microbiology he completed his PhD in 1958 in biochemistry. Until 1960 he worked as a visiting researcher at the University of California, Berkeley

University of California, Berkeley

The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...

 and the California Institute of Technology

California Institute of Technology

The California Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Pasadena, California, United States. Caltech has six academic divisions with strong emphases on science and engineering...

, at which point he became a researcher at the Glasgow Institute of Virology. In 1968 he became head of the Department of Virology at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund, a position he held until 1988 when he returned to the University of Cambridge to join the Pathology Department as a researcher. The same year he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. He was awarded the Gabor Medal

Gabor Medal

The Gabor Medal is a medal awarded by the Royal Society of London for "acknowledged distinction of interdisciplinary work between the life sciences with other disciplines". The medal was created in 1989 to honour the memory of Dennis Gabor, and is awarded biennially...

 of the Royal Society in 2005 "in recognition for his work on the small DNA tumour viruses, specifically the papova virus group, papilloma, polyoma and SV40". In 1979, he published the first description of the p53

P53

p53 , is a tumor suppressor protein that in humans is encoded by the TP53 gene. p53 is crucial in multicellular organisms, where it regulates the cell cycle and, thus, functions as a tumor suppressor that is involved in preventing cancer...

protein and in the following years made essential contributions that showed the significance of this protein to tumorogenesis.