The Epigenetics Revolution

And that was the genius of John Gurdon’s work. When he performed his experiments what he was attempting was exceptionally challenging with the technology of the time. If he failed to generate toads from the adult nuclei this could simply mean his technique had something wrong with it. No matter how many times he did the experiment without getting any toads, this wouldn’t actually prove the hypothesis. But if he did generate live toads from eggs where the original nucleus had been replaced by the adult nucleus he would have disproved the hypothesis. He would have demonstrated beyond doubt that when cells differentiate, their genetic material isn’t irreversibly lost or changed. The beauty of this approach is that just one such toad would topple the entire theory – and topple it he did.

John Gurdon is incredibly generous in his acknowledgement of the collegiate nature of scientific research, and the benefits he obtained from being in dynamic laboratories and universities. He was lucky to start his work in a well set-up laboratory which had a new piece of equipment which produced ultraviolet light. This enabled him to kill off the original nuclei of the recipient eggs without causing too much damage, and also ‘softened up’ the cell so that he could use tiny glass hypodermic needles to inject donor nuclei. Other workers in the lab had, in some unrelated research, developed a strain of toads which had a mutation with an easily detectable, but non-damaging effect. Like almost all mutations this was carried in the nucleus, not the cytoplasm. The cytoplasm is the thick liquid inside cells, in which the nucleus sits. So John Gurdon used eggs from one strain and donor nuclei from the mutated strain. This way he would be able to show unequivocally that any resulting toads had been coded for by the donor nuclei, and weren’t just the result of experimental error, as could happen if a few recipient nuclei had been left over after treatment.

John Gurdon spent around fifteen years, starting in the late 1950s, demonstrating that in fact nuclei from specialised cells are able to create whole animals if placed in the right environment i.e. an unfertilised egg[6]. The more differentiated/specialised the donor cell was, the less successful the process in terms of numbers of animals, but that’s the beauty of disproving a hypothesis – we might need a lot of toad eggs to start with but we don’t need to end up with many live toads to make our case. Just one non-murderous doctor will do it, remember?

So John Gurdon showed us that although there is something in cells that can keep specific genes turned on or switched off in different cell types, whatever this something is, it can’t be loss or permanent inactivation of genetic material, because if he put an adult nucleus into the right environment – in this case an ‘empty’ unfertilised egg – it forgot all about this memory of which cell type it came from. It went back to being a naive nucleus from an embryo and started the whole developmental process again.

Epigenetics is the ‘something’ in these cells. The epigenetic system controls how the genes in DNA are used, in some cases for hundreds of cell division cycles, and the effects are inherited from when cells divide. Epigenetic modifications to the essential blueprint exist over and above the genetic code, on top of it, and program cells for decades. But under the right circumstances, this layer of epigenetic information can be removed to reveal the same shiny DNA sequence that was always there. That’s what happened when John Gurdon placed the nuclei from fully differentiated cells into the unfertilised egg cells.

Did John Gurdon know what this process was when he generated his new baby toads? No. Does that make his achievement any less magnificent? Not at all. Darwin knew nothing about genes when he developed the theory of evolution through natural selection. Mendel knew nothing about DNA when, in an Austrian monastery garden, he developed his idea of inherited factors that are transmitted ‘true’ from generation to generation of peas. It doesn’t matter. They saw what nobody else had seen and suddenly we all had a new way of viewing the world.

The epigenetic landscape

Oddly enough, there was a conceptual framework that was in existence when John Gurdon performed his work. Go to any conference with the word ‘epigenetics’ in the title and at some point one of the speakers will refer to something called ‘Waddington’s epigenetic landscape’. They will show the grainy image seen in Figure 1.1.