A good old-fashioned scientific conference in the guise of an anniversary party. Includes audacious audio!
Last week, I gatecrashed a party at the Wellcome Trust / Cancer Research UK Gurdon Institute in Cambridge. To celebrate the institute’s 21st anniversary, many of its current and former staff had gathered to hear a programme of scientific talks and to catch up with old friends and colleagues.
As an outsider, I was deeply impressed by the spirit of the Gurdon’s scientists, and by an appeal to cut through some of the complexity of modern biology.
Professor Sir John Gurdon sounds rather embarrassed as he explains how he came to have an institute named after him while still very much alive. Sir John was the oldest of the six scientists who co-founded the institute in 1991, so when the time came to give it a more personal name than the ‘Wellcome Trust / Cancer Research Campaign Institute’ (as it was originally), his name was adopted. He says there was…
View original post 968 more words
