A tribute to Sir John Gurdon

Abstract

Since he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2012, John Gurdon׳s remarkable contributions to biology have been celebrated in innumerable reviews and commentaries. He has since claimed that his early observations, that nuclei from differentiated cells could be reprogrammed by the factors in a fertilized egg to rerun the entire embryonic program, should not surprise us – after all, the sperm nucleus is reprogrammed by the oocyte with every fertilization event. Indeed John׳s original reports in the 1970s, documenting a pluripotent stem cell state in nuclei from fully differentiated frog intestinal epithelial cells induced by the egg cytoplasm, were to wait almost forty years before receiving the accolades they deserved.

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