Yippy - you have reached adulthood! You are now fully developed frog and have offspring of your own!

Your eggs will begin the process of development all over again.

The Gurdon Institute

John Gurdon

Our institute, only a stones throw away from here down Tennis Court Lane, is named after Sir John Gurdon, whose work on the South African clawed frog answered one of the most pressing questions in biology: does every cell in the body contain the same set of genes?

He performed an elegant experiment in which he transplanted the nucleus (where DNA is stored) of an intestinal frog cell into a fertilised egg where the nucleus had been removed. Amazingly, the egg was then able to develop normally into a frog larvae.

This showed that cells from specialised tissues, such as skin or muscle, still contain all the necessary information (i.e. genes) to generate an entire animal.

It also meant that cells can be “reprogrammed”, opening up the possibility of turning, for instance, the skin cells of a patient suffering from Alzheimer’s disease into brain cells — a technique that scientists are using today to better understand disease mechanisms.

For his work on nuclear reprogramming, Sir John Gurdon was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2012, giving a lecture titled “The egg and the nucleus: a battle for supremacy”. Sir John Gurdon still conducts research in his laboratory at the Gurdon Institute today.

Organoids

Ever since Aristotle, who studied chicken embryos by opening up eggs and peering inside during development, scientists have made use of different organisms to model physiological processes in humans.

This is possible as many genes are the same across different species; the fruit fly, for instance, shares 75% of disease-causing genes with humans.

Despite this, there are many aspects of human physiology that cannot be entirely understood using other species as models.

Recently, scientists have been able to grow 3D tissues called organoids, which are derived from human skin cells that are reprogrammed to generate other types of tissues such as brain, gut, lung, or heart.

Organoids will allow us to model human organs in order to discover unknown processes controlling development, to test the efficiency of drugs, and to model diseases such as cancer.

Image: Human brain organoid by Alex Donovan

Riddles

  • You have spotted me already,

    when your journey began,

    But can you tell us which county

    I was found in the sand?

  • Which county was the Fin Whale at the Museum of Zoology found?

*Remember to start your answer with a Capital letter.

““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, Nobel Prize Interview, 2012.