David Lane, executive director, Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology, Singapore

Following his first postdoc at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund in London, David Lane earned a rare freedom. He was offered a lectureship at Imperial College London, but was allowed a leave of absence to do another fellowship first at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, on the understanding that he would return to Imperial after two years.

Almost 30 years later, Lane finds himself in a similar position. He is leaving the University of Dundee, UK, for two years, to head the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology in Singapore's ‘Biopolis’ – an ambitious attempt by the Singapore government to build life sciences from the ground up. (see CV).

The first time he went away with no worries about his return, good things happened. The freedom in New York “allowed me to be quite bold and take on things I wanted to”, Lane says. As a result, he was the first person at Cold Spring Harbor to make monoclonal antibodies – a key tool that would later fuel the biotech boom. And that independence, fostered early by his PhD adviser Avrion Mitchison at University College London, set the pattern for his career. “Avrion never put his name on anything I wrote,” says Lane, “he just let me get on with it.”

That ethos of independence allowed Lane to return to London with experience when he was 27. He already had his own grants, and so had funding freedom. That allowed him to apply immunochemistry to identify and characterize proteins. As a result, he made key findings on the machinery of p53, a tumour-suppressor gene, and he has studied the gene and protein for much of his career.

Lane says that more young scientists should experience the freedom he had early in his career. “I think everybody needs it,” he says. But he says young scientists also can't expect someone to hand them autonomy on a platter – they shouldn't “wait for people to tell them what to do”, he notes.

Although Singapore has a reputation for top-down control, Lane says he expects to experience autonomy when he moves to the island nation in January. And the fact that he will return to his job in Britain in two years' time will allow him to be typically bold in pursuing it.