Martin Evans

Cardiff University

Martin John Evans was a British developmental biologist and Nobel laureate at Cardiff University who made two transformative contributions to modern biomedicine. First, he isolated and cultured the first murine embryonic stem (ES) cells from the inner cell mass of mouse blastocysts — pluripotent cells capable of indefinite self-renewal and differentiation into any cell type. This established the ES cell system that became the cornerstone of developmental biology research. Second, together with Gail Martin, he developed the techniques for maintaining ES cells in culture and demonstrated their ability to contribute to chimeric mice and the germline. These methods were then exploited by Capecchi and Smithies to introduce specific gene modifications by homologous recombination, creating the knockout mouse. Evans shared the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his contributions to gene targeting. His ES cell work laid the conceptual foundation for human embryonic stem cell research and the eventual development of induced pluripotent stem cells. Evans passed away in 2023.