John Gurdon
John Gurdon
Sir John Bertrand Gurdon FRS FMedSci, is an English developmental biologist. He is best known for his pioneering research in nuclear transplantation and cloning. He was awarded the Lasker Award in 2009. In 2012, he and Shinya Yamanaka were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for the discovery that mature cells can be converted to stem cells...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth2 October 1933
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I must have been born with a strong attraction toward, and possibly even an aptitude for, doing things on a small scale.
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If you explain to a patient what can be done and what might be the downsides, let the patient choose; don't have ethicists, priests, or doctors say you may or may not have replacement cells.
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In principle. what is done is to take the nucleus out of a cell with a very fine micro-pipette or needle and introduce it into an egg. That had been done with amphibians a long time ago, and then there was a long pause of many years before people were clever enough to make that work in the sheep.
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I remember that, at an early age, I spent many months making a three-masted sailing boat with rigging in a half-walnut shell.
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If you took some famous religious leader, for example, and said it would be nice to clone them indefinitely so you have a dynasty of leaders, my own guess would be that each time the cloning takes place, they would become more and more defective, presumably mentally defective and subsequently worse.
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I myself have been a major beneficiary of the view that no animal will more repay treatment that is kind and fair.
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As a brand new graduate student starting in October 1956, my supervisor Michail Fischberg, a lecturer in the Department of Zoology at Oxford, suggested that I should try to make somatic cell nuclear transplantation work in the South African frog Xenopus laevis.
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It is particularly pleasing to see how purely basic research, originally aimed at testing the genetic identity of different cell types in the body, has turned out to have clear human health prospects.
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The work I was involved in had no obvious therapeutic benefit. It was purely of scientific interest. I hope the country will continue to support basic research even though it may have no obvious practical value.
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As with most animal eggs, the early events of amphibian development are largely independent of the environment, and the processes leading to cell differentiation must involve a redistribution and interaction of constituents already present in the fertilized egg.
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It's a very complex network of genes making products which go into the nucleus and turn on other genes. And, in fact, you find a continuing network of processes going on in a very complex way by which genes are subject to these continual adjustments, as you might say - the computer programmer deciding which genes ultimately will work.
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There's a danger of some of the best people saying, 'I don't want a career in science.'
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Once the principle is there, that cells have the same genes, my own personal belief is that we will, in the end, understand everything about how cells actually work.
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The earliest example known to me of replaced body parts is exemplified by a Mayan skull dating back to 1400 BC. In this skull, false teeth made of stone had been implanted.