We enthusiastically endorse Prof. Pleasantine Mill (Prof. of Cilia Biology at the University of Edinburgh and MRC Investigator at the MRC Human Genetics Unit, Edinburgh) for the Wolpert Medal. Prof. Mill is an outstanding Developmental Biologist who has enthused us and others in our own research topics in developmental biology. The reasons for nominating her are listed below:

• Leadership and community building

Prof. Mill has demonstrated exceptional initiative and leadership by keeping the global cilia community connected. Her efforts since the early 2020 lockdowns have kept lines of scientific communication open and fostered collaborations amongst a global community of researchers.

She has organised over 50 UK Cilia Network e-symposia which ran weekly during the peak of the pandemic lockdowns and now run quarterly. Given the importance of cilia in developmental processes, the e-symposia bring together a global and diverse network of developmental biologists and other scientists working on all aspects of cilia.

A major focus of the cilia e-symposia is to provide a platform and exposure to graduate students, ECRs and junior PIs. Her stewardship during the pandemic promoted scientific communication during challenging times for junior researchers and kept us all going.

• Promotion of understanding of developmental disorders

Prof. Mill has over 20 years of experience as a Developmental Geneticist. Throughout this time, she has advocated and campaigned for more funding for the study of rare developmental ciliopathies.

She is on the Scientific Advisory Board for Ciliopathy Alliance and Primary Ciliary Dyskinesia (PCD) Research (UK Patient Charities), member of the leadership team for the UK Cilia Network and the MRCs Congenital Anomalies Cluster. Through her many leadership roles, she has directed her efforts to promote research on rare developmental diseases. Her group has also undertaken important public engagement activities including the PCD Awareness Day in 2018 and PCD Family Day 2019.

• Championing voices for ECRs and junior PIs

Prof. Mill’s drive in her field of modeling rare developmental disorders and her passion for equitable science has inspired a diverse generation of new cell and developmental biologists, including us. As minority scientists with fledgling independent groups, we have both especially benefited from the platforms she created for research conducted by junior PIs. We are certain, like us, she has inspired countless other emerging developmental biologists.

For these and many other reasons, we feel strongly that Prof. Mill is fully deserving of a Wolpert Medal in recognition of her heroic efforts to promote equitable and open scientific communication and for inspiring a new wave of developmental biologists.

• Girish Ram Mali
• Raman Das

I first met David exactly 44 years ago this month, at the 1980 EMBO Drosophila Workshop in Crete. This was a meeting reserved for principal investigators to which I had somehow gained admission, despite still being a mere PhD student. As I entered the reception on the first evening, I was feeling extremely nervous and intimidated by all the senior scientists gathered around chatting in groups and was desperately looking around the room for someone who might speak to me. And then I came across David, who, with his characteristic smile, engaged me in conversation about my research interests. He immediately put me at my ease and gave me the confidence to make the most of the meeting, something I will never forget.

Eighteen months later I saw an advertisement for a research fellowship in David’s lab and did not hesitate to apply. David invited me for interview at the ICRF labs in Mill Hill, an experience that for me was both exhilarating and life-changing. We talked all day about how fruit fly embryos develop and his plans to understand the function of the “hairy” gene that he had just succeeded in cloning – one of the first of the so-called segmentation genes to be isolated molecularly. The combination of David’s razor-sharp mind and child-like enthusiasm was irresistible and I did not think twice about accepting when he offered me the post. So began three of the most exciting years of my scientific career. David’s thirst for knowledge was infectious and I could not wait to get into the lab each day to see what new phenomena we would uncover.

The joy of making new discoveries – be they inside or outside the lab – is something David never lost. Indeed, only a few weeks ago when I last visited David and Ros, his wife, in their flat in London, he excitedly told me that he had discovered a new entrance to the Barbican Arts Centre! When he explained that this was located half-way down the ramp to the underground car park, I must admit that I did wonder if his illness (glioblastoma) might be playing tricks with his memory. But I happily agreed to go for a walk with him so that he could show me – and sure enough, as we descended the ramp into the carpark, there was the door that led us straight into the entrance foyer of the centre!

David’s satisfaction at having found the best route into the Barbican from his flat was palpable, a reflection of his constant quest to find the best way of doing everything. This trait was worth its weight in gold to those who worked in his lab – he consumed the scientific literature obsessively and could always tell you the latest and best ways of doing things, often prefaced by “what you should have done”! It was David who introduced me to SP6 polymerase, which revolutionized the synthesis of probes for in situ hybridization. The fact that this superseded the single stranded DNA probes, the synthesis of which David himself had perfected with his post doc, Julian Burke, was of no concern to him – he thrived on technological progress.

Outside the lab, David could always tell you the best places to ski, the best restaurants to eat at, the best wines to drink – the list was endless, informed by his voracious appetite for reading “Which”! There was only one occasion when he got things badly wrong: I had wanted to buy a HiFi so naturally sought his advice. He told me which turntable, amplifier and speakers to buy and which audio store to buy them from, in West Hampstead as it happened, which I duly visited one Saturday afternoon. The next Monday David asked excitedly if I had got everything – “yes” I replied “and I bought a CD player too!” David’s expression immediately changed and he shook his head: “no, no” he exclaimed, “CDs will be obsolete in a couple of years when Sony launch DAT (Digital Audio Tape)” That was in 1984!

Not only was David always happy to give advice, he was also incredibly generous with his time. I recall him staying late one evening to show me how to do colony lifts of a phage library that he had helped me construct in an effort to clone the trithorax gene, something he encouraged me to do in my “spare” time. We did this in his cramped and cluttered lab-cum-office whilst listening to the Archers on the radio! Many years later, after I had moved away from the DBU in Oxford – where we had been colleagues for nearly 10 years – and established what was to become an MRC Centre in Sheffield, I asked David if he would serve on its Scientific Advisory Board. He agreed without hesitation; and most recently it was David to whom I turned when I needed an external assessor on an appointments panel for the Living Systems Institute in Exeter, a role he fulfilled with his customary thoroughness, insight and good humor.

David began his scientific career sequencing a tRNA – he has left us enriched by the qualities denoted by the much shorter sequence of a well-known restriction site, CCGG: Caring, Compassionate, Generous, Genius.

Thank you for everything David – I will miss you.

Philip Ingham FRS

Raymond Schinazi and Family Chair of Life Sciences

University of Bath

I have written many letters on behalf of numerous students to support their applications for various prizes, jobs, and positions, including several previous Beddington Medal applications. However, writing a letter supporting Delan Alasaadi for this award comes with great ease, as Delan has been an excellent Ph.D. student.

Delan developed great curiosity; he continuously engaged with his colleagues in discussions during our lab meetings and beyond. With unique ambition, he sought novel ideas to test in his project. With impeccable determination, breaking the physical barrier, he established collaborations and sought expertise across Europe and other continents, learning the most challenging techniques and valuable lessons.

Delan’s PhD thesis was about the role that tissue mechanics could play in neural crest induction. This was a risky project because of the lack of tools to measure and modify mechanics in vivo. Delan spent the first part of his Ph.D. designing biophysical tools to investigate the feasibility of the question at hand, showing great creativity in his experimental approaches. Embryonic induction is the process by which a group of cells sends signals to adjacent tissues, changing their differentiation fate. An important aspect of embryonic induction, which has been poorly studied, is how the receiving tissue regulates the response to the inductive signals—a process known as ‘competence.’ Additionally, while the molecules involved in embryonic induction have been identified, the role of mechanical cues in this process has remained largely unexplored. Delan found that during early development, the hydrostatic pressure of the blastocoel cavity increases. This increase is sensed by the ectoderm cells above the cavity, modulating Yap activity, which in turn regulates the response to Wnt signaling—a key player during neural crest induction. Thus, Delan found, for the first time, the mechanism that could explain the loss of neural crest competence during development: the increased hydrostatic pressure leads to the retention of Yap/b-catenin in the cytoplasm, impairing neural crest induction even in the presence of the inducer Wnt (loss of competence). Delan showed that this mechanism is conserved in embryos of different species (e.g., amphibians, mice, humans). This work has been recently accepted in Nature Cell Biology (2024), with Delan as the sole first author.

There are two important aspects of how Delan approaches research that make him a deserving winner of the Beddington Medal:

Fearless and ambitious: There was not a single technique or experiment that Delan did not learn if he considered it necessary to address his PhD project. Consequently, he set up in my lab many techniques that we did not have, such as micropipette aspiration, microcomputed tomography, Micro-pressure probe (servo-null) to measure hydrostatic pressure, and in vivo biophysical tools among others.

 Commitment: Not only did he work countless hours and overcome the limitations of developing his PhD during the COVID-19 pandemic, but he also showed a commitment to his work and experiments that is difficult to find. Just one example: he wanted to measure the hydrostatic pressure inside the embryo, but there are only a few labs worldwide that have the equipment and expertise to do it. He found a lab in the Netherlands that could teach him the technique, but we failed to get a source of Xenopus embryos from the Netherlands; instead, we got embryos from Belgium. So, every day, Delan had to travel to Belgium in the morning, get recently fertilized embryos that he kept in a low-temperature incubator on the train, and rush back to the lab in the Netherlands to conduct the experiments. He succeeded!

In addition to his main Ph.D. work accepted in Nature Cell Biology, he is the co-first author of another paper published in Developmental Biology about neural crest migration and the first author in a two-author review to be published in the journal Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences titled “Mechanically guided cell fate determination in early development,” written entirely by Delan.

In conclusion, Delan has been the only and mighty driving force behind his PhD work, identifying for the first time that mechanics (hydrostatic pressure) controls embryonic competence. His findings resolve a 100-year-old question: how embryonic competence is regulated, and which implications in stem cell research and cell therapy approaches? He is a motivated and dedicated young researcher, and all his efforts deserve to be recognized with an award such as the Beddington Medal. Therefore, I support this application in the strongest way possible.

• Roberto Mayor

Published work: