Up for auction the "Nobel Prize in Medicine" John Gurdon Signed Album Page. 

ES-4984

Sir

John Bertrand Gurdon FRS FMedSci MAE (born

2 October 1933) is an English developmental biologist. He is best known for his pioneering research

in nuclear transplantation  and cloning. He was awarded the Lasker Award in 2009. In 2012, he and Shinya Yamanaka were awarded the Nobel Prize

for Physiology or Medicine for the discovery that mature cells

can be converted to stem cells. Gurdon

attended Edgeborough and then 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;

Gurdon 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 to Christ Church, Oxford, to

study classics but switched to zoology. For his DPhil degree he

studied nuclear transplantation in a frog species of the genus Xenopus] with Michael Fischberg at Oxford. Following

postdoctoral work at Caltech, he returned to England and his early posts

were at the Department of Zoology of the University of Oxford (1962–71).

Gurdon has spent much of his research career at the University of Cambridge,

first at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular

Biology (1971–83) and then at the Department of Zoology

(1983–present). In 1989, he was a founding member of the Wellcome/CRC Institute

for Cell Biology and Cancer (later Wellcome/CR UK) in Cambridge, and was its

Chair until 2001. He was a member of the Nuffield Council on

Bioethics 1991–1995, and Master of Magdalene College,

Cambridge, from 1995 to 2002. 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 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. 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.