John Gurdon. Portrait of British geneticist John Gurdon (born 1933), Professor of Cell Biology at Cambridge University and Chairman of the Wellcome CRC Institute for Cancer & Developmental Biology in Cambridge, UK. Educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, Gurdon was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1971. His research concerns the way genes control the development of specialised cells from rapidly dividing cells in vertebrate embryos. Because cancers contain rapid- ly dividing cells that have lost their specialized functions, this work is of major importance in the fight against cancer.