Sir John Gurdon (1933–2025): Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine

British developmental biologist Sir John Bertrand Gurdon, whose groundbreaking work demonstrated that mature cells could be reprogrammed to become pluripotent, died on October 7, 2025, at the age of 92.

Gurdon was born on October 2, 1933, in Dippenhall, United Kingdom, and passed away in Hardingham, UK. His death was confirmed by the University of Cambridge, where he had been affiliated since 1971 through the Gurdon Institute.

In 2012, Gurdon shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Shinya Yamanaka for their discoveries showing that mature cells can be reprogrammed to become pluripotent stem cells. The Nobel Committee cited their work for proving that specialized cells are not permanently fixed in their function and can be induced to develop into any cell type in the body.

His pioneering experiments began in 1962 when he removed the nucleus from a fertilized egg cell of a frog and replaced it with the nucleus from a intestinal cell of a tadpole. The modified egg developed into a fully functional frog, demonstrating that the genetic material in a mature cell retained the complete information necessary to generate all cell types in an organism.