John Gurdon

Someone makes a, a judgment about us, and over time we start tre- treating that judgment as a description of who we are.

You know, there's a remarkable example of this in the life of scientist Sir John Gurdon.

You know, when he was a schoolboy, his biology teacher wrote a report dismissing his ambition to become a scientist as ridiculous.

Years later, Gurdon shared the 2012 Nobel Prize in Psychology of Medicine.

Not all toxic frogs are dart frogs either.

The Mantella frogs of Madagascar independently evolved bright coloration and skin toxins through a completely separate evolutionary pathway, which is an example of what biologists call convergent evolution.

If you have ever touched a frog and been told to wash your hands, it is not because the frog is necessarily poisonous.

Most frogs are harmless, but frog skin secretions can irritate eyes and mucous membranes, and also because human skin oils and chemicals can harm the frog.

Cell identity turned out to be reversible.

In 1962, John Gurdon put a tadpole gut cell's nucleus into a frog egg.

Some of those eggs grew into normal tadpoles.

Some? How many? About 1.5%.

I mean, it was incredible, right? I mean, I, I, my...

I joke that I got to be Harry Potter for, for a couple years, right? You know, you go, you're surrounded by these storied academic researchers, Nobel laureates, and I mean, I, you know, Sir John Gurdon had been the master at my college right before, um, me, and so we'd have dinner in, at high table, and you're sitting next to, to, to John and having these conversations, and it's just an incredible place as a young person to be exposed.

I also think the interesting part is my first year where I lived, you're in a house with, you know, uh, I was living with an astrophysicist doing a PhD, a woman who's studying southeast, uh, uh, uh, cosmopolitism in Southeast Asia, right? And so just the, like, stoichiometric interactions, uh, uh, interactions that you're having was just amazing in a place like Cambridge versus you're in a silo and you're doing a PhD around this area and inch wide, mile deep.

And so I got to go and, and really see a lot, experience a lot.