[6] Hunter was born in 1943 in the United Kingdom and educated at Felsted School, prior to Christ's College, Cambridge, where he was awarded a PhD in 1969 for research on protein synthesis.

From 1971 to 1973, he was a postdoctoral research associate of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California.

[8] He also sits on the Selection Committee for Life Science and Medicine which chooses winners of the Shaw Prize.

[citation needed] He won the Wolf Prize in Medicine in 2005 for "the discovery of protein kinases that phosphorylate tyrosine residues in proteins, critical for the regulation of a wide variety of cellular events, including malignant transformation".

[9] He has been granted along with Charles Sawyers and Joseph Schlessinger with the 2014 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Biomedicine category for "carving out the path that led to the development of a new class of successful cancer drugs".