Keynote Speaker

Professor Sir John Gurdon, DPhil, DSc, FRS
Wellcome Trust/Cancer Research UK Gurdon Institute of Cancer and Developmental Biology, Cambridge, UK

Sir John Gurdon attended Eton College, majoring in Classics, before moving into Zoology at the University of Oxford against earlier advice- now infamous- on his unsuitability for a career in science. Gurdon performed his PhD research with Michael Fischberg on nuclear transplantation in the African Clawed frog, Xenopus laevis. After a year studying bacteriophage genetics at Caltech, California, Gurdon returned to the University of Oxford and his Xenopus studies. In 1971, he moved to Cambridge, first to the MRC Molecular Biology Laboratory and later to the Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge. In 1990, Gurdon moved to the new Wellcome Trust/Cancer Research UK Institute where he served as Founding Chair until 2001. The institute took its current name in his honor in 2004.

Gurdon has made seminal contributions to the fields of developmental and stem cell biology starting with his graduate work, during which he obtained a fully mature Xenopus frog by nuclear transfer of a nuclei from a differentiated cell. This provided the decisive evidence that specialized cells are genetically equivalent, differing in the genes they express, not the genes they contain. Gurdon continues to work with Xenopus, using this powerful model organism to probe the mechanisms of cellular differentiation, the control of gene expression and developmental competence.

Gurdon has been the recipient of numerous prestigious awards including the Royal and Copley medals from the Royal Society and the Wolf Prize in Medicine. He is a Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Sciences, a Member of the European Molecular Biology Organization and a Member of the Academie Europea.

Updated November 16, 2007