Professor Nicholas Jones is Director of the Cancer Research Campaign, Patterson Institute for Cancer Research at Manchester. He has an international reputation for discoveries made with viruses and yeast that has informed our understanding of cancer. He has had a along standing interest in how DNA tumour viruses deregulate cell growth and division, thereby causing transformation of the cell. As an example of his work, he characterised the E1A gene from adenovirus, which encodes a transacting transcriptional regulator that deregulates transcription in infected cells.