John Gurdon Quotes

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

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

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.

I get into lab early and leave a bit early, too. So I like to have an hour or two before everybody comes in.

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.

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.

If you took some famous religious leader, for example, and said it would be nice to clone them indefinitely so you have a dynasty of leaders, my own guess would be that each time the cloning takes place, they would become more and more defective, presumably mentally defective and subsequently worse.

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.

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

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

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

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

The work I was involved in had no obvious therapeutic benefit. It was purely of scientific interest. I hope the country will continue to support basic research even though it may have no obvious practical value.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Shinya Yamanaka’s work has involved mice and human cells, and advances the prospect of providing new cells or body parts for patients.