Gurdon

As the 2012 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, Sir John Gurdon has made many admirable contributions to Science. He studied nuclear transplantation in the frog Xenopus with Michael Fischberg, Ph.D. and obtained the first clone of genetically identical adult vertebrate animals and demonstrated genetic totipotency of somatic cell nuclei. He did postdoctoral work at Cal-Tech (Pasadena, California) on bacteriophage genetics. He later became the head of Cell Biology at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge and initiated the Cancer Research Campaign Unit of Molecular Embryology. In 1990, he moved to the new Wellcome CRC Institute of Cancer and Developmental Biology in Cambridge, and served as chairman from 1990 to 2001. In 2001, the Institute was renamed The Gurdon Institute. From 1995 to 2002, Dr. Gurdon was master of Magdalene College, Cambridge and governor of the Wellcome Trust from 1995 to 2000.