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
cells principle understand work
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.
cannot route
I think that I cannot immediately see the route by which we should really understand memory and the workings of the brain.
accepted health human improve problems public relieve solving turned useful view widely
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.
bit everybody lab
I get into lab early and leave a bit early, too. So I like to have an hour or two before everybody comes in.
age early months sailing spent
I remember that, at an early age, I spent many months making a three-masted sailing boat with rigging in a half-walnut shell.
amazing master rather report roughly says worst
I have this rather amazing report which, roughly speaking, says I was the worst student the biology master had ever taught.
aptitude attraction possibly
I must have been born with a strong attraction toward, and possibly even an aptitude for, doing things on a small scale.
doctors might
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.
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.
compared eggs embryos figured life worked
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.
absolutely derived grew left moved nuclear paper publish technician time took
I left my frogs, which I had grown, with my supervisor, who had moved to Geneva, and he and a technician grew them up. So by 1962, they were adults, and one could publish a paper to say that these animals, derived from nuclear transfer, really were absolutely normal. So it took a little time to get through.
clone cloning dynasty famous guess mentally nice presumably religious takes time took
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.
major repay treatment
I myself have been a major beneficiary of the view that no animal will more repay treatment that is kind and fair.
dating earliest example false known parts replaced skull teeth
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.