John Gurdon Quotes

United Kingdom, Biologist
October 2, 1933

Sir John Bertrand Gurdon FRS FMedSci MAE (born 2 October 1933), 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.

I remember that, at an early age, I spent many months making a three-masted sailing boat with rigging in a half-walnut shell.

John Gurdon
- Remember
- Age
- Boat
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.

John Gurdon
- Work
- October

I think that I cannot immediately see the route by which we should really understand memory and the workings of the brain.

John Gurdon
- Brain
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.

John Gurdon
- Done
- May
Shinya Yamanaka's work has involved mice and human cells, and advances the prospect of providing new cells or body parts for patients.

John Gurdon
- Work
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.

John Gurdon