Like Albert Einstein, whose 1895 report stated “he will never amount to anything,” Sir John Gurdon has proved his early critics wrong

A British scientist won the Nobel prize today – and proudly revealed his school report said it would be a “waste of time” for him to pursue science.

Cambridge professor Sir John Gurdon, 79, won the coveted Nobel medicine or physiology award for his groundbreaking stem cell research published in 1962.

But he still keeps the damning report given to him by his Eton science teacher when he was 15 years old.

It reads: “I believe Gurdon has ideas about becoming a scientist; on his present showing this is quite ridiculous; if he can’t learn simple biological facts he would have no chance of doing the work of a specialist, and it would be a sheer waste of time, both on his part and of those who would have to teach him.”

At the time he was in the bottom set for every science subject and ranked last out of the 250 boys in his year at biology.

But like Einstein, whose 1895 report stated “he will never amount to anything,” Gurdon has proved his early critics wrong.

Gurdon grinned as he said today: “That completely terminated my science at school.

“When you have problems like an experiment doesn’t work, which often happens, it’s nice to remind yourself that perhaps after all you’re not so good at this job and the schoolmaster may have been right.”

He also told how a “very nice man from the, I suppose, Swedish Academy or whatever it is” called him up at 8.30am today to tell him he had won the prize.

He added: “He said enough things to make me believe that he was, in fact, the right person because you can always have people pulling your leg.”

Gurdon was recognised along with Japan’s Shinya Yamanaka for their work the prize committee said: “revolutionized our understanding of how cells and organisms develop.”

In 1962 Gurdon showed the genetic information inside a cell taken from the intestines of a frog could create a whole new frog in a technique that eventually gave rise to Dolly the sheep, the first cloned mammal.

Forty years later in 2006 Yamanaka developed Gurdon’s work to show how skin cells could be turned into stem cells.

It is hoped the findings will revolutionise medicine by using a sample of person’s skin to create stem cells to repair the heart after a heart attack or reverse Alzheimer’s disease.

The Nobel committee said: “The discoveries of Gurdon and Yamanaka have shown that specialized cells can turn back the developmental clock under certain circumstances.

“These discoveries have also provided new tools for scientists around the world and led to remarkable progress in many areas of medicine.”

Gurdon said he was “immensely honoured to be awarded this spectacular recognition.”

He and Yamanaka will share a prize of eight million Swedish kronur (£750,000).