Sir John Bertrand Gurdon (2 October 1933 – 7 October 2025) was a British developmental biologist, best known for his pioneering research in nuclear transplantation and cloning. Awarded the Lasker Award in 2009, in 2012, he and Shinya Yamanaka were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery that mature cells can be converted to stem cells.
Early life and career Gurdon was born 2 October 1933 in Dippenhall and grew up in nearby Frensham in Surrey. He attended Edinburgh prep school before Eton College, where he ranked last out of the 250 boys in his year group at biology, and was in the bottom set in every other science subject. A schoolmaster wrote a report stating, "I believe he has ideas about becoming a scientist; on his present showing this is quite ridiculous." Gurdon explains it is the only document he ever framed; he also told a reporter: "When you have problems like an experiment doesn't work, which often happens, it's nice to remind yourself that perhaps after all you are not so good at this job and the schoolmaster may have been right!" Gurdon went up to Christ Church, Oxford, to read classics then switched to zoology, graduating as MA. For his DPhil degree he studied nuclear transplantation in a frog species of the genus Xenopus, supervised by Dr Michail Fischberg at Oxford University. After pursuing further postdoctoral work at Caltech, he returned to England where his early posts were in the Department of Zoology at the University of Oxford (1962–71). Gurdon spent much of his research career at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology and then in the Department of Zoology, where he started working in 1972. He became a professor at the University of Cambridge in 1983. In 1989, he became a founding member of the Wellcome/CRC Institute for Cell Biology and Cancer at Cambridge, which was renamed in his honour in 2004, serving as its chairman until 2001. He served as a member of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics 1991–1995, then Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, from 1995 to 2002.
Research
Nuclear transfer In 1958, Gurdon, then at the University of Oxford, successfully cloned a frog using intact nuclei from the somatic cells of a Xenopus tadpole. This work was an important extension of work of Briggs and King in 1952 on transplanting nuclei from embryonic blastula cells and the successful induction of polyploidy in the stickleback, Gasterosteus aculatus, in 1956 by Har Swarup reported in Nature. At that time he could not conclusively show that the transplanted nuclei derived from a fully differentiated cell. This was finally shown in 1975 by a group working at the Basel Institute for Immunology in Switzerland. They transplanted a nucleus from an antibody-producing lymphocyte (proof that it was fully differentiated) into an enucleated egg and obtained living tadpoles. Gurdon's experiments captured the attention of the scientific community as it altered the notion of development and the tools and techniques he developed for nuclear transfer are still used today. The term clone (from the ancient Greek word κλών (klōn, "twig")) had already been in use since the beginning of the 20th century in reference to plants. In 1963 the British biologist J. B. S. Haldane, in describing Gurdon's results, became one of the first to use the word "clone" in reference to animals.
Messenger RNA expression Gurdon and colleagues also pioneered the use of Xenopus (genus of highly aquatic frog) eggs and oocytes to translate microinjected messenger RNA molecules, a technique which has been widely used to identify the proteins encoded and to study their function.
Later career Gurdon's later research had focused on analysing intercellular signalling factors involved in cell differentiation, and on elucidating the mechanisms involved in reprogramming the nucleus in transplantation experiments, including the role of histone variants, and demethylation of the transplanted DNA.
Politics and religion Gurdon stated that he was politically "middle of the road", and religiously agnostic because "there is no scientific proof either way". During his time as Master of Magdalene, Gurdon caused some controversy by suggesting that Fellows might occasionally be allowed to deliver "an address on anything they would like to talk about" in college chapel services. In an interview with EWTN.com, Gurdon declared "I'm what you might call liberal-minded. I'm not a Roman Catholic. I'm a Christian, of the Church of England."
Personal life and death Gurdon married Jean Elizabeth Margaret Curtis, with whom he had two children. He believed himself to be an "anti-intellectual" and hated to read books. He was a keen skier, hiker, squash and tennis player. Gurdon died on 7 October 2025, five days after his 92nd birthday, with professors from the University of Cambridge and the Gurdon Institute paying tribute.
Honours and awards Gurdon was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1971, and knighted in the 1995 Birthday Honours for "services to Developmental Biology".
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