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
cell clever fine introduce needle pause people time work
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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I have this rather amazing report which, roughly speaking, says I was the worst student the biology master had ever taught.
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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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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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For my part, I have worked all my life with eggs and embryos of frogs. Compared to other small animals, these have figured prominently in the world of literature.
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I get into lab early and leave a bit early, too. So I like to have an hour or two before everybody comes in.
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There is no doubt that I was blessed with a considerable amount of luck.
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I think that I cannot immediately see the route by which we should really understand memory and the workings of the brain.
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I take the view that anything you can do to relieve suffering or improve human health will usually be widely accepted by the public - that is to say, if cloning actually turned out to be solving some problems and was useful to people, I think it would be accepted.
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I wondered whether the nuclear transfer techniques could be used to introduce purified macro-molecules into an egg, and hence into embryonic cells.
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The aim of a nuclear-transplant experiment is to insert the nucleus of a specialized cell into an unfertilized egg whose nucleus has been removed.
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The importance of the egg's non-nuclear material - the cytoplasm - in early development is apparent in the consistent relation that is seen to exist between certain regions in the cytoplasm of a fertilized egg and certain kinds or directions of cell differentiation.