ON A day that normally falls midway between the Advent procession and the television recording of Carols from King’s, the Fellows of King’s College, Cambridge, have their “Annual Congregation”: the most important meeting of the year. After it, there is lunch. King’s being such a diverse and often dispersed community, this is the only lunch of the year at which the Fellows gather exclusively and in significant numbers.
One year, I found myself sitting next to a man I had rarely seen before. Small, slight, and softly spoken, he was, I knew, a scientist, and I hoped that I could find enough small talk to hide my embarrassing ignorance of his field.
Conversation was, shall we say, stilted — although, had I then known more about his remarkable life story, I would have assailed him with relentless questions. After one long silence, he lent towards me with a smile, and I thought at last the conversation was going to take off. “I have disproved the Virgin birth,” he whispered.
THE scientist was Professor Azim Surani CBE, a professor of developmental biology at the Gurdon Institute. In 2025, he was awarded the prestigious Kyoto Prize for Life Sciences.
Surani’s life story is extraordinary. Of Indian descent, he grew up in Kenya, and was charmed by the diversity of life all around him, especially the beautiful butterflies, and the fish in Lake Victoria. He made his way to England to obtain a scientific education, and dedicated himself to research before he really knew what it was.
The story of his scientific career is a mesmerising combination of overcoming racism and responding to moments of good fortune; most significant was a half-hour chat in a bar with the pioneer of in vitro fertilisation, Bob Edwards (later Sir Robert Edwards, Nobel Laureate in 2010), which led — without further interview or process — to his being offered a funded place in Cambridge to study for a Ph.D.
The constants in Surani’s life have been curiosity, and a determination to overcome obstacles. He is the model of the self-effacing, humble scientist, exploring what is interesting with dedication and diligence, and openness to whatever truth reveals itself. As a result, he has made discoveries that not only revolutionised our understanding of inheritance, but also have significant practical consequences.
ONE of Surani’s long-standing fascinations was with parthenogenesis — virgin birth — which, despite being quite common in many organisms, was never observed in mammals. Curious about this, Surani set out to try to create a mouse using only an egg with no genetic contribution from a father. The experiments showed early promise, but no embryo made it to term.
But Surani was determined, and did “hundreds more” experiments; at one point, he so timed his work that, had it been successful, a virgin-conceived mouse would have been born on Christmas Day.
But it wasn’t.
The failure, not of this particular attempt, but of the project as a whole, was hugely important, and led to more curiosity. The result — to cut short a story that is long and complicated, and way over my head — is the new science of epigenetics.
ONE way of thinking about epigenetics is in terms of what we were taught about nature and nurture in school. We were told that everything that we inherited came to us through our genes, which found expression in all aspects of our biology. DNA — the double helix nature of which was unravelled by other curious life scientists, just down the road from where Surani and I talked over lunch — was the sole key to the mystery of life.
The failure to facilitate mammalian pathogenesis led Surani to realise that inheritance was not so cut and dried. Doubt about such a central doctrine of biology was not immediately welcomed, and the young scientist realised that he was walking into risky territory. Most of his seniors were sceptical. But he presented the evidence and drew the rational conclusions.
Surani showed that, when a few particular genes were passed from parents to child, they “remembered” whether they had come from mother or father. He called this “imprinting”. It involves genes’ being turned off by a chemical tag extraneous to the DNA. In this way, the activity of a gene is changed without any alteration to the DNA itself.
SURANI’s research is important, both because of the truth it reveals about inheritance and because of its medical implications. At least 14 human diseases have their origins in malfunctions of genetic imprinting. Thanks to his work, prospects for both diagnosis and therapy are much higher. It also has implications for age-related conditions, and, amazingly, has opened the door to the possibility of using skin cells to fabricate egg and sperm cells. One application of that could possibly be the saving of endangered species.
Disproving the Virgin birth, through what Surani now thinks of as an embarrassing number of experiments with mice, might be just the tip of this scientific iceberg; but, theologically, it hangs heavy in the air for me. This whispered bombshell detonated just a few days before we recorded a carol service that would be watched by more than one million people, and three weeks before our Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols would be broadcast to more than 100 million around the world — a service that Surani has attended and enjoyed on many occasions.
IT IS almost half a century since Surani began his work on parthenogenesis. Coincident with that, in 1977, John Hick and his colleagues published The Myth of God Incarnate. I remember the furious reaction to its publication well enough not to want to poke that hornets’ nest — although noting, perhaps, that all male hornets are virgin-born. The contents of that book may have been provocative, but the laudable intention was to engage “the kind of thought that is needed if Christianity is to retain its intellectual integrity”.
The question I am left with, however, is less about what Surani told me about the scientific impossibility of Virgin birth. I am happy to remain an agnostic about the biology of Christmas, while remaining faithful to a Trinitarian faith, based on the core belief that, somehow, God inhabited human flesh and experienced the contingencies and constraints of bodily life.
What impresses me more about Surani’s discoveries is that they were so curiosity- driven, and so open to unlikely possibilities. Surani — from a Muslim background, and not especially interested in religion — embodies for me a set of virtues that exemplify an open and contemplative stance rather than a closed-minded and doctrinaire one.
WHAT curiosity and contemplation have in common is a radial openness to truth, and an attitude of absolute humility before it. Curiosity seems more restless than contemplation, but deep curiosity is not so much the anxious nagging of “Why?” or “How?”. Rather, it is the capacity to observe reality for long enough to come to a better understanding; to “behold” patiently enough to allow a genuinely worthwhile and important question to arise — and then not to bat it away defensively.
As I once again lead carol services on radio and television, I will feel comfortable inviting people “in heart and mind to go even unto Bethlehem and see this thing which is come to pass, and the babe lying in a manger”, and to let whatever they see, behold, or encounter there spark delight, wonder, awe, praise, contemplation — and curiosity: curiosity that may not be comfortable, but that might lead to ever deeper apprehensions of grace and truth.
The Revd Dr Stephen Cherry is Dean of King’s College, Cambridge. His new podcast, Encounters with King’s College chapel, is available here.
He reviews Existential Hope here