John Gurdon Quotes

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.

We managed to write chapter one. Chapter two, we will have a child a parent can take home and raise as a cloned child.

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

We are at a major epoch in human history, which is that we don't need sex to recreate the race. You can have babies without sex. This is the first time in human history that has been true, and it means, for example, we could do some extraordinary things.

Cloning interferon was not something I wanted to get into.

Within six months of starting my Ph.D. work in 1956, I had already obtained feeding tadpoles derived from transplanted nuclei of embryonic cells.

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.

We're not really under pressure to deliver a cloned baby to this world. What we are under pressure to do is to deliver a cloned baby that is a healthy one.

If there is anything more frightening than the threat of global nuclear war, it is the certainty that humans not only stand on the verge of producing new life forms but may soon be able to tinker with them as if they were vintage convertibles or bonsai trees.

Suppose that every prospective parent in the world stopped having children naturally, and instead produced clones of themselves. What would the world be like in another 20 or 30 years? The answer is: much like today. Cloning would only copy the genetic aspects of people who are already here.

I may be the only person in the world who has my own embryonic cells growing in a petri dish.

Like the 'test tube babies' born of in vitro fertilization, cloned children need not be identifiable, much less freaks or outcasts.

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.

What the public needs to understand is that these new technologies, especially in recombinant DNA technology, allow scientists to bypass biological boundaries altogether.

Cloning isn’t all that unusual. For thousands of years we have been cloning plants.

If society becomes comfortable with cloning and sees value in true human diversity, then the whole Neanderthal creature itself could be cloned by a surrogate mother chimp - or by an extremely adventurous female human.

If you can modify a cell, it's only a short step to modifying a mouse, and if you can modify a mouse, it's only a step to modifying a higher animal, even man.

Cloning looks like a degrading of parenthood and a perversion of the right relation between parents and children.

There is absolutely no doubt about it, and I may not be the one that does it, but the cloned child is coming. There is absolutely no way that it will not happen.

Our increasing ability to alter our biology and open up the processes of life is now fueling a new cultural war.

Right now people are interested in genetic engineering to help the human race. That's a noble cause, and that's where we should be heading. But once we get past that - once we understand what genetic diseases we can deal with - when we start thinking about the future, there's an opportunity to create some new life-forms.

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.

I think we can allow the therapeutic uses of nuclear transplant technology, which we call cloning, without running the danger of actually having live human beings born.

I do not think that there is a reputable scientist on this planet who would advocate using this technology to generate a human child as was just announced.

In Massachusetts, scientists have created the first human clone. The bad thing is that in thirty years, the clone will still be depressed because the Boston Red Sox will still have not won a World Series.