Tony Hunter received his B.A. in 1965 and his Ph.D. in 1969 for studies of mammalian protein synthesis under Asher Korner in the Department of Biochemistry, University of Cambridge. He was an independent Research Fellow in the Department from 1968 to 1971 and a postdoctoral fellow at the Salk Institute from 1971 to 1973, working under Walter Eckhart on polyomavirus DNA replication. He rejoined the Salk Institute as an Assistant Professor in 1975 in the Molecular and Cell Biology Laboratory, where he is currently the Renato Dulbecco Chair in Cancer Research and American Cancer Society Professor. He studies how the proliferation and division of cells are controlled and how mutations in growth regulatory genes lead to cancer. In this context, he discovered tyrosine phosphorylation as a novel protein modification and showed it is important for malignant transformation of cells and the cellular response to growth factors. This discovery has resulted in the development and approval of more than 80 tyrosine kinase inhibitors that offer a new approach to cancer treatment. He has received many prestigious prizes for this work, including the Wolf Prize in Medicine in 2005 and, together with Charles Sawyers and Joseph Schlessinger, the 2014 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Biomedicine category. For the past 10 years, he has been investigating protein–histidine phosphorylation, an understudied posttranslational modification, exploring its possible role in cancer.