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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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 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.
best danger people science
There's a danger of some of the best people saying, 'I don't want a career in science.'
embryonic hence purified techniques transfer whether wondered
I wondered whether the nuclear transfer techniques could be used to introduce purified macro-molecules into an egg, and hence into embryonic cells.
advances cells human involved parts prospect providing work
Shinya Yamanaka's work has involved mice and human cells, and advances the prospect of providing new cells or body parts for patients.
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My first attempts to transplant nuclei in Xenopus were completely unsuccessful, because the Xenopus egg, unlike those of other amphibians, is surrounded by an extremely elastic membrane and jelly layer that make penetration by a micropipette impossible.
Nuclear transplantation is a technique that has enormously facilitated the analysis of these interactions between nucleus and cytoplasm.
derived embryonic feeding months obtained six work
Within six months of starting my Ph.D. work in 1956, I had already obtained feeding tadpoles derived from transplanted nuclei of embryonic cells.
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Within one year of starting work, I had found that the nucleus of an endoderm cell from an advanced tadpole was able to yield some normal development up to the nuclear transplant tadpole stage.
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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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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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There is no doubt that I was blessed with a considerable amount of luck.
cell early involve largely leading processes
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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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.