John Gurdon

Sir John Bertrand Gurdon (1933 to 2025) was a British developmental biologist whose experiments on nuclear transplantation in frogs of the genus Xenopus changed how biologists understood cell differentiation. Born in Dippenhall and raised in Surrey, he read classics and then zoology at Christ Church, Oxford, and took his doctorate under Michail Fischberg. In 1958 he cloned a frog using intact nuclei from the somatic cells of a tadpole, and he and his colleagues also pioneered the use of Xenopus eggs and oocytes to translate injected messenger RNA, a technique widely used to identify the proteins that genes encode and to study their function. He spent much of his career at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology and the University of Cambridge, where a research institute was renamed in his honour in 2004, and he was Master of Magdalene College from 1995 to 2002. In 2012 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Shinya Yamanaka for the discovery that mature cells can be reprogrammed to become pluripotent.