John Gurdon Quotes

John Gurdon

Profession : Scientist

Birth : October 2, 1933

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.

John Gurdon

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.

John Gurdon

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.

John Gurdon

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.

John Gurdon

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.

John Gurdon

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.

John Gurdon

There is no doubt that I was blessed with a considerable amount of luck.

John Gurdon

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

John Gurdon

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

I myself have been a major beneficiary of the view that no animal will more repay treatment that is kind and fair.

John Gurdon

Nuclear transplantation is a technique that has enormously facilitated the analysis of these interactions between nucleus and cytoplasm.

John Gurdon

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.

John Gurdon

Within six months of starting my Ph.D. work in 1956, I had already obtained feeding tadpoles derived from transplanted nuclei of embryonic cells.

John Gurdon

There's a danger of some of the best people saying, 'I don't want a career in science.'

John Gurdon

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.

John Gurdon

I wondered whether the nuclear transfer techniques could be used to introduce purified macro-molecules into an egg, and hence into embryonic cells.

John Gurdon

I have this rather amazing report which, roughly speaking, says I was the worst student the biology master had ever taught.

John Gurdon

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.

John Gurdon

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.

John Gurdon

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