Pushing biology forward

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NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Monday, December 29th.

Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Nick Eicher.

JENNY ROUGH, HOST: And I’m Jenny Rough.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: The beginnings of cloning.

Several giants of the scientific world died this year. Those names include Jane Goodall, who devoted her life to studying Chimpanzees in Tanzania... Richard Garwin, who authored the first hydrogen bomb design… and Edward Blake, who revolutionized DNA testing at crime scenes.

EICHER: Today, we devote our usual History Book time to one scientist in particular, John Gurdon…

He grew up studying the classics and died this fall as one of the fathers of modern-day gene editing.

WORLD’s Mary Muncy has his story.

MARY MUNCY: In 2012, John Gurdon won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. But in 1947—when Gurdon was 15—he ranked at the bottom of his biology class.

His teacher was frank on his report card. Audio here from a 2012 interview with Cambridge University.

GURDON: ‘Any thought of Gurdon being a scientist is completely ridiculous and this would be total waste of time on his part and on those who would have the job of teaching him.’

That report card was the end of Gurdon’s early scientific studies and aspirations.

So he turned to the classics. But Gurdon’s mother saw he wanted to know things like how seeds turn into plants.

GURDON: How can it know how to do it? And that fascinated me. Whereas I wasn’t terribly interested in being able to translate the Iliad or Odyssey.

So, at age 18, she signed him up for extra schooling in zoology. He graduated university in 1956 and then he started his doctoral program, studying developmental biology.

His doctoral supervisor started him out replicating another scientists’ experiment, looking at how DNA works within a cell.

The original experiment transplanted a nucleus from one frog’s cell into a different frog’s egg.

For the earlier scientists, an egg only grew into a healthy adult if the transplanted nucleus was in its early stages of development. So, they theorized that there is a certain point when a cell’s purpose is locked in—a skin cell could no longer be reprogrammed to work in the eye or liver.

But in the mid-1950s, Gurdon transferred a nucleus from a mature frog’s gut cell into an egg and it grew into a healthy tadpole.

Gurdon had just cloned the first complex animal. Gurdon talked about his work with the University of California.

GURDON: At first it led to quite a lot of controversy. I mean, here was I, just a graduate student, sort of testing the conclusions of two highly respected workers. So naturally enough, people didn’t believe what I said. And I couldn’t see why.

So he went back to the lab with his professor, and they ruled out a few other possible reasons that the experiment could have worked. There were a few differences from the previous experiments, but the biggest one turned out to be just a different kind of frog.

And by the end of their testing, they were sure Gurdon had rewritten the way we understand a cell’s life cycle.

GURDON: What we now understand is that as cells develop, they contain the same set of genes, the only difference is something decides to read the skin genes in skin and brain genes in brain.

His discovery opened the door for the first cloned mammal in 1997.

CNN: Her name is Dolly… Scientists say a clone was created from a single cell taken from the udder of a sheep.

Then, a breakthrough in gene editing in 2012.

CBS MORNINGS: CRISPR could help rid us of diseases like cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy, and even HIV and cancer.

And earlier this year, scientists edited the first cells within a living human.

CBS MORNINGS: A baby named KJ born with a rare genetic disorder is the first person in the world to be successfully treated with a tailor-made gene therapy.

But this technology comes with some big ethical questions, things like what should we be allowed to choose about our genes? Does it stop with preventing chronic disease? What about eye or hair color?

How about performing the experiments at all? Should scientists be able to practice on human embryos?

Gurdon had his own answers to these questions.

In 2008, Gurdon told an interviewer that he was agnostic and disagreed with the Catholic Church’s view that embryos are early human life and shouldn’t be experimented on.

GURDON: I would say that this early human embryo is actually not a potential life and has no significant validity. I don’t think it may or may not have a soul, doesn’t matter. That fact is you’re not killing anything that’s significant and if you don’t do it, you’re then not taking advantage in the way that we could of relieving an awful lot of human suffering.

He told another outlet that same year that he was a humanist and valued progress over debating ethical questions. During a lecture, he said the fact that someone could possibly misuse science or technology shouldn’t impede scientific advancement.

GURDON: Because for example, if you really wanted to save lives, you would ban all cars and transportation. But we don’t choose to do that. There’s always an element of disadvantage to most advantages.

But in the same way the government puts traffic laws in place, scientific advancement needs safety measures too.

Cars need seatbelts and airbags to protect passengers… scientists need guardrails and ethics boards to protect them from man’s imperfect nature. It’s not clear whether Gurdon favored some guardrails, his studies of the classics should have made him wary. To put it another way, a well-rounded person looks backward to guide their progress forward.

Even so, Gurdon told interviewers that he was happy he chose a life of science.

GURDON: I would not have liked spending the whole of my life getting back to where someone was already. You like to go forward, not backward. That I think is the great appeal of science.

John Gurdon died in October. He was 92 years old.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Mary Muncy.

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