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" There's a danger of some of the best people saying, 'I don't want a career in science.' "
John Gurdon
Career
Science
Saying
Related Quotes:
" For my part, I have worked all my life with eggs and embryos of frogs. Compared to other small animals, these have figured prominently in the world of literature. "
John Gurdon
Animals
Small
Life
" 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. "
John Gurdon
See
Research
Identity
" 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. "
John Gurdon
Leader
You
Time
" I wondered whether the nuclear transfer techniques could be used to introduce purified macro-molecules into an egg, and hence into embryonic cells. "
John Gurdon
Transfer
Cells
Egg
" As a brand new graduate student starting in October 1956, my supervisor Michail Fischberg, a lecturer in the Department of Zoology at Oxford, suggested that I should try to make somatic cell nuclear transplantation work in the South African frog Xenopus laevis. "
John Gurdon
Student
October
Frog
" Within one year of starting work, I had found that the nucleus of an endoderm cell from an advanced tadpole was able to yield some normal development up to the nuclear transplant tadpole stage. "
John Gurdon
Year
Development
Normal
" Within six months of starting my Ph.D. work in 1956, I had already obtained feeding tadpoles derived from transplanted nuclei of embryonic cells. "
John Gurdon
Work
Cells
Feeding
" Shinya Yamanaka's work has involved mice and human cells, and advances the prospect of providing new cells or body parts for patients. "
John Gurdon
New
Involved
Human
" If you explain to a patient what can be done and what might be the downsides, let the patient choose; don't have ethicists, priests, or doctors say you may or may not have replacement cells. "
John Gurdon
Choose
Cells
You
" It's a very complex network of genes making products which go into the nucleus and turn on other genes. And, in fact, you find a continuing network of processes going on in a very complex way by which genes are subject to these continual adjustments, as you might say - the computer programmer deciding which genes ultimately will work. "
John Gurdon
You
Turn
Say
" I myself have been a major beneficiary of the view that no animal will more repay treatment that is kind and fair. "
John Gurdon
Will
Fair
View
" 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. "
John Gurdon
Early
Development
Egg
" I get into lab early and leave a bit early, too. So I like to have an hour or two before everybody comes in. "
John Gurdon
Leave
Two
Lab
" I left my frogs, which I had grown, with my supervisor, who had moved to Geneva, and he and a technician grew them up. So by 1962, they were adults, and one could publish a paper to say that these animals, derived from nuclear transfer, really were absolutely normal. So it took a little time to get through. "
John Gurdon
Normal
Animals
Time
" There is no doubt that I was blessed with a considerable amount of luck. "
John Gurdon
Amount
Luck
Blessed
" I think that I cannot immediately see the route by which we should really understand memory and the workings of the brain. "
John Gurdon
Think
Brain
Memory
" The work I was involved in had no obvious therapeutic benefit. It was purely of scientific interest. I hope the country will continue to support basic research even though it may have no obvious practical value. "
John Gurdon
Research
Work
Value
" I must have been born with a strong attraction toward, and possibly even an aptitude for, doing things on a small scale. "
John Gurdon
Strong
Attraction
Born
" My first attempts to transplant nuclei in Xenopus were completely unsuccessful, because the Xenopus egg, unlike those of other amphibians, is surrounded by an extremely elastic membrane and jelly layer that make penetration by a micropipette impossible. "
John Gurdon
Impossible
Layer
First
" I have this rather amazing report which, roughly speaking, says I was the worst student the biology master had ever taught. "
John Gurdon
Worst
Master
Biology
" 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. "
John Gurdon
My Own
Understand
End
" The earliest example known to me of replaced body parts is exemplified by a Mayan skull dating back to 1400 BC. In this skull, false teeth made of stone had been implanted. "
John Gurdon
Teeth
Back
Body
" In principle. what is done is to take the nucleus out of a cell with a very fine micro-pipette or needle and introduce it into an egg. That had been done with amphibians a long time ago, and then there was a long pause of many years before people were clever enough to make that work in the sheep. "
John Gurdon
Enough
Long
Time
" I remember that, at an early age, I spent many months making a three-masted sailing boat with rigging in a half-walnut shell. "
John Gurdon
Early
Age
Boat