Christ Church alumnus Sir John Gurdon has been announced as the joint winner of this year’s Medicine Nobel Prize for his groundbreaking discovery that mature cells can be reprogrammed to become pluripotent.
Christ Church alumnus Sir John Gurdon has been announced as the joint winner of this year’s Medicine Nobel Prize for his groundbreaking discovery that mature cells can be reprogrammed to become pluripotent.
Sir Gurdon described himself as “immensely honoured” to be given the reward and “enormously grateful” for the work of his colleagues. Stem cells contain the genetic information to specialise and become part of any tissue in the body. When these cells mature they lose information they no longer need to express.
Previously, it was thought that once a stem cell had matured it had irreversibly lost its genetic information. Sir Gurdon’s discovery showed that this is not the case, as the information from multiple mature cells can be added together to effectively recreate a stem cell.
Julian Savulescu, Professor of Practical Ethics at Oxford claims Gurdon congratulated the winners on what their research would mean for medicine. “Until now, dead or damaged tissue and organs, for example in the brain or heart, have been replaced by scar tissue. This results in loss of function … Regenerative medicine offers the prospect of replacing dead or damaged human parts with new functioning ones.”
It was in Oxford’s Department of Zoology in 1972 that Sir Gurdon first developed his hypothesis. He replaced the cell nucleus of a frog egg cell with the nucleus from a mature intestinal cell. The modified egg still developed into a healthy tadpole, showing that all the necessary genetic information was still there in the intestinal cell.
Though Gurdon’s initial discovery took place at Oxford, he subsequently moved to Cambridge where he became a Professor and Master of Magdalene College. The Gurdon Institute in Cambridge was renamed in 2004 in honour of his work.
Gurdon’s scientific success was not always so widely acknowledged. He has framed a school report from when he was at Eton, aged 15, in which his master describes his scientific ambitions as, “quite ridiculous”, warning that “any time spent on it would be a total waste.”
