A Noble Nobel Laureate

Isn't it a classic tale of ignorance clashing with pride?  A boy, consumed with the prospect of spending his life work in science.  Crestfallen when his science teacher has nothing but contempt for his scientific bent.  Declaring the young student to be wasting his aspirations in wishing to become a scientist, and wasting the time of the educators who would be saddled with the inept, disorganized, incapable mind of someone unable to understand the fundamentals of biology.

Enthusiasm slightly dampened, but determined to follow his path, that young boy kept the damning report from his Eton College schoolmaster.  Then went on with his life.  And with a sense of mischievous parody of how the world turns and life's many paradoxes, brought it out for public scrutiny.  Just as he triumphed as a Nobel laureate, co-winning the 2012 Nobel Prize in medicine.

For his groundbreaking discovery in stem cells created through reprogrammed body tissues.  The boy whose academic performance placed him at the bottom of his boarding school class for every science subject, who was dead last out of 250 boys in biology, winning international recognition with the Nobel prize 40 years after his discovery.  Sharing that prize with another scientist, who built on John Gurdon's original finding.

Dr. Gurdon was the first scientist to clone an animal (an amphibian as it happens), and his partner in the award of the Nobel Prize in medicine, Japanese stem cell researcher Shinya Yamanaka discovered the proteins whereby an adult cell can be converted to an egg-like state.  Techniques that would produce stem cells, bypassing the moral dilemma of using embryonic stem cells from foetuses.

Undifferentiated stem cells could be reassigned to ultimately treat and perhaps even reverse the effects of Parkinson's and diabetes, and schizophrenia, among other ailments haunting humankind.  The now-79-year-old scientist had framed that awful school report.  And he went on to found his own Gurdon Institute in Cambridge, a cell biology and cancer institute, named in his honour.

Dr. Gurdon explained that the schoolmaster had been hired to teach the bottom-achieving pupils at the school; and he was recalled as not being a very good teacher.  "The main gist of it was that he had heard Gurdon was interested in doing science and that this was a completely ridiculous idea because there was no hope whatever of my doing science.

"When you have problems like an experiment doesn't work, which often happens, it's nice to remind yourself that perhaps after all you are not so good at this job and the schoolmaster may have been right."  Obviously, however, the schoolmaster was hugely wrong; his dismissal of the aptitude and intelligence of his young pupil could have been a devastating blow to a fragile ego.

The world has gained much by the fact that this is not what occurred at all.  that Dr Gurdon went on to realize his dream and to furnish the world of science with yet another scaffold on which to build vitally important research to result in an expectation-shattering biological breakthrough.