"My own view of development is that one has to try to narrow things down to single entities, whether it's a cell or a nucleus or a molecule, and I'm often ridiculed because I always ask people what concentration their molecule is at, and they'll say that it doesn't matter. I'd say that concentration and time are the two critical things in development. You need to know the concentration, and you need to know how long it has to be there to make a difference – because for cells, a particular concentration of a molecule for a few seconds may not be the same as that concentration for 10 minutes. So I would take the view that what we really lack in developmental biology at the moment is any ability to determine the concentration of proteins, analogous to the measurement of nucleic acids using PCR."
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University of Cambridge facultyNon-fiction authors from EnglandBiologists from EnglandNobel laureates in Physiology or MedicineNobel laureates from England
Original Language: English
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as quoted by Aidan Maartens:
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Gurdon
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John Gurdon
Sir John Bertrand Gurdon (2 October 1933 – 7 October 2025) was an English zoologist, who shared the 2009 Lasker Award and shared the 2012 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Shinya Yamanaka for stem cell research.
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