John Gurdon - Early Days

Early Days

Gurdon attended 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 later had this report framed; he 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 D.Phil. he studied nuclear transplantation in the frog 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, UK, first at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (1971–83) and then at the Department of Zoology, (1983–date). 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.