James Sharpe

James Sharpe's winning image is not just beautiful, with hints of Leonardo's anatomical sketches, it also embodies the heart of science - progress through creative thinking, innovation and experimentation:

"Without creativity, science would really not get very far at all."

James's work within the Medical Research Council's Human Genetics Unit, Edinburgh, attempted to understand one of the single most baffling fields of biological research, namely 'pattern formation': essentially, "how you get something as complicated, spatially and organisationally, as a fully grown animal, let's say, starting from a single cell".

This is no small task and when James attempted to gain a deeper understanding of how this phenomenon unfolds within the limbs of a mouse, he quickly realised the technology - the ability to observe how genes were behaving on a large, animal-wide scale - was lacking.

Until, that is, he created it and opened up an entirely new way of seeing for scientists everywhere: "one of the most exciting things about this kind of image, this technology, is that we've already, a number of times, looked at something that we thought was well described and because we're now seeing it in a different way, just with a new tool, discovered that there are aspects of basic anatomy - embryo anatomy, which were not well described - until now".

There's a comforting humility in James's manner, a sense that, for him, science is not just a career, it is simply a maturation of his childhood curiosity: "for some reason I just felt very interested in science from a young age…I've been very lucky that I've been able to do what was kind of my dream from being a teenager."

"My interest, really, is in simply progressing scientific understanding of the world."