Video: Nobel Prize winner Sir John Gurdon told becoming a scientist was 'completely ridiculous idea' British clone pioneer Professor Sir John Gurdon and Professor Shinya Yamanaka, from Kyoto University, won the Nobel Prize for Medicine for their work on reprogramming ordinary cells into immature stem cells. In 1962, while still a graduate student, Sir John made a pivotal early discovery that set the stage for future cloning research. He successfully cloned the South African frog Xenopus from a tadpole's intestinal cell. By transplanting the cell nucleus into an empty Xenopus egg cell, he produced a frog that was genetically identical to the original tadpole. The result sent shock waves through the scientific community, proving that the genetic code in the cell nucleus contained all the information needed to create a new organism. More than four decades later, in 2006, Prof Yamanaka showed how mature cells in mice could be made to revert to a youthful embryonic state. Like stem cells from embryos, the "induced pluripotent stem cells," or iPSCs, had the potential to develop into any kind of cell in the body. Sir John said that his career in science received little encouragement during his school years at Eton College where he was not allowed to study science until the age of 15. He applied to Christ Church, Oxford to study classics because his school master told him the idea of him becoming a scientist was "a completely ridiculous idea" and "anytime spent on doing science would be a waste of his time and the time of the person teaching it."