Abstract

Professor Sir John Gurdon is an English developmental biologist, best known for his pioneering research in nuclear transplantation and cloning. He was awarded the Lasker Award in 2009, and in 2012 he and Shinya Yamanaka were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for the discovery that mature cells can be reprogrammed to become pluripotent.

Professor Sir Gurdon went to Christ Church, Oxford to study classics, before switching to zoology and completing a DPhil degree studying nuclear transplantation in a frog species of the genus Xenopus. He has since held posts at Caltech, the University of Oxford, and at the University of Cambridge MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology and Department of Zoology. He was the master of Magdalene College from 1995 to 2002.