Science in film

On Monday 8 November, Sir John Gurdon was bustled into a meeting room at the Wellcome Trust to face a wall of TV cameras, journalists and photographers in a special press conference. Professor Gurdon, a former governor of the Trust after whom the Wellcome Trust–Cancer Research UK Gurdon Institute was named, had just been awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology for the discovery that mature cells can be reprogrammed to become immature cells that are capable of developing into all tissues of the body. That same evening, the Wellcome Trust was able to announce a second prize-winner on its premises. Not for a Nobel Prize this time, but rather the inaugural winner of the Wellcome Trust Screenwriting Prize.