John Gurdon

“The first point to remember is that attempts to clone mice have actually been very unsuccessful for at least a decade. Sheep have been successful. So one asks, 'Where do humans lie?' Most people think they are somewhere between the two, but at least there's a reasonable chance they might be clone-able.”

“Nuclear transplantation is a technique that has enormously facilitated the analysis of these interactions between nucleus and cytoplasm.”

“Once the principle is there, that cells have the same genes, my own personal belief is that we will, in the end, understand everything about how cells actually work.”

“I must have been born with a strong attraction toward, and possibly even an aptitude for, doing things on a small scale.”

“Shinya Yamanaka's work has involved mice and human cells, and advances the prospect of providing new cells or body parts for patients.”

“If you took some famous religious leader, for example, and said it would be nice to clone them indefinitely so you have a dynasty of leaders, my own guess would be that each time the cloning takes place, they would become more and more defective, presumably mentally defective and subsequently worse.”

“I wondered whether the nuclear transfer techniques could be used to introduce purified macro-molecules into an egg, and hence into embryonic cells.”

“As with most animal eggs, the early events of amphibian development are largely independent of the environment, and the processes leading to cell differentiation must involve a redistribution and interaction of constituents already present in the fertilized egg.”

“The importance of the egg's non-nuclear material - the cytoplasm - in early development is apparent in the consistent relation that is seen to exist between certain regions in the cytoplasm of a fertilized egg and certain kinds or directions of cell differentiation.”

“It is particularly pleasing to see how purely basic research, originally aimed at testing the genetic identity of different cell types in the body, has turned out to have clear human health prospects.”