Sir John B.

Sir John B. Gurdon
Sir John Bertrand Gurdon, FRS (born 2 October 1933) is a British developmental biologist. He is best known for his pioneering research in nuclear transplantation and cloning. Hewas 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.
Gurdonattended Eton College, where he ranked last out of the 250 boys in his year group at biology, and was in the bottom set in every other science subject. A schoolmaster wrote a report stating "Ibelieve he has ideas about becoming a scientist; on his present showing this is quite ridiculous." Gurdon later had this report framed; he told a reporter "When you have problems like an experiment doesn'twork, which often happens, it's nice to remind yourself that perhaps after all you are not so good at this job and the schoolmaster may have been right."
Gurdon went to Christ Church, Oxford, tostudy classics but switched to zoology. For his D.Phil. he studied nuclear transplantation in the frog Xenopus with Michael Fischberg at Oxford. Following postdoctoral work at Caltech, he returned toEngland and his early posts were at the Department of Zoology of the University of Oxford (1962–71).
Gurdon has spent much of his research career at the University of Cambridge, UK, first atthe MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (1971–83) and then at the Department of Zoology, (1983–date). In 1989, he was a founding member of the Well come/CRC Institute for Cell Biology and Cancer (later Well come/CRUK) in Cambridge, and was its Chair until 2001. He was a member of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics 1991–1995, and Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge from 1995 to 2002.
Nuclear transfer
In1958, Gurdon, then at the University of Oxford, successfully cloned a frog using intact nuclei from the somatic cells of a Xenopus tadpole. This work was an important extension of work of Briggs and...