I did my best work 50 years ago, says Nobel winner John Gurdon

British scientist John Gurdon, awarded the Nobel Medicine Prize on Monday, admitted he had done the bulk of the cell programming work for which he was honoured half a century ago.

The 79-year-old, with a shock of swept-back greying blond hair, held a hastily-arranged press conference in London, just hours after being telephoned by the Nobel academy with the news of his award.

He told reporters his ground-breaking work “was essentially to show that all the different cells of the body have the same genes.

“The work that I did was to test that proposition. In the 1950s we really didn’t know.

“The outcome was that they do. That means that, in principle, you should be able to derive any one kind of cell from another because they’ve all got the same genes.

“That was the contribution I made at that time. Some people say, ‘That was done 50 years ago, have you been sitting round gardening ever since?’”

Gurdon, who shared the Nobel with Japan’s Shinya Yamanaka for work in cell programming, said he was “immensely honoured” by the award.