Obituary: Professor Sir John Gurdon

Professor Sir John Gurdon, pioneer of developmental biology and Nobel Prize winner, has died aged 92.

Professor Gurdon's work showed that if a nucleus from a tadpole's somatic cell was transplanted into a frog egg cell with its original nucleus removed, the eventual egg would develop into a clone of the tadpole. This discovery earned him the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2012, alongside Professor Shinya Yamanaka (see BioNews 676 and 677).

'John was able to show that the nucleus from a tadpole intestine would support the development of an individual adult animal,' Sir Jim Smith, emeritus scientist at the Francis Crick Institute in London told the Guardian. 'And that was a really profound result. It showed that, effectively, nuclei could go backwards in developmental time.'

Born in 1933, Professor Gurdon was educated at Eton College then Oxford University, where he received a first-class honours degree in zoology. It was during his time as a graduate student at Oxford that he made his Nobel Prize winning discovery, that the egg cell environment could induce reprogramming of the transplanted nucleus into an unspecialised, pluripotent stem cell state.

Stem cells are unspecialised cells with the ability to develop into different kinds of specialised cells. Later experiments showed that human cells too can be reprogrammed using this method, opening the door to new therapies involving replacing cells damaged by disease or injury, with new healthy ones derived from stem cells. In his life, Professor Gurdon was enthusiastic about the use of cell reprogramming and cell replacement therapy in treating human diseases (see BioNews 691).

By cloning Xenopus laevis, the African clawed frog as his chosen organism for experimentation, Professor Gurdon became the first person in history to successfully clone an animal. Considered the 'godfather of cloning', his work was the first example of somatic cell nuclear transfer, the technique used by Professor Sir Ian Wilmut's team at the University of Edinburgh to create Dolly the sheep, the first cloned mammal (see BioNews 1131 and 1207).

Professor Gurdon relocated his lab to the University of Cambridge in 1983, where he became Professor of Cell Biology. He founded the Wellcome Institute for Cell Biology and Cancer in 1991 alongside long-time collaborator Professor Ron Laskey, later renamed the Gurdon Institute in his honour. In 1995, he was knighted, and became the master of Magdalene College at the University of Cambridge until 2002.

Professor Ben Simons, director of the Gurdon Institute, said: 'As well as being a towering figure in developmental and stem cell biology, through his dedication to science, his affection for colleagues and his humility, Sir John Gurdon was an inspiration to us all.'