Sir Martin John Evans

Sir Martin John Evans British geneticist, Ph.D., University College London, 1969. After serving on the faculty at University College London (1966-78) and Cambridge (1978-99), he became a professor at Cardiff Univ. in 1999. With Mario Capecchi and Oliver Smithies , Evans received the 2007 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for developing gene targeting, a powerful technology that enables virtually unlimited modification of mouse DNA and has thereby laid the foundation for scientists to ascertain the roles played by individual genes in disease. Evans's critical contribution to the work was his discovery that early mouse embryos, now known as embryonic stem cells , could be used to establish the chromosomally normal cell cultures needed to carry out gene targeting.