Professor Sir Martin J. Evans gained his BA in Biochemistry from Christ's College, University of Cambridge in 1963. He received an MA in 1966 and a DSc in 1996. In 1969 he was awarded a PhD degree from University College, London.

After graduating from Cambridge in 1963 Sir Martin decided on a career studying the genetic control of vertebrate development and undertook research for his PhD at University College London in the department of Anatomy and Embryology. During this early research on changes of messenger RNA profile during neural induction in Xenopus he was using pioneering techniques of agarose gel electrophoresis and metabolic double labelling. These experiences led to a realisation of the need for a tractable experimental system to study development in isolation from the whole embryo and with the possibilities of genetic manipulation and he therefore chose to explore the use of cultures of mouse teratocarcinoma stem cells in tissue culture systems. He was the first to maintain these cells in tissue culture under conditions where their ability to differentiate was retained indefinitely. Studies from his laboratory showed extensive differentiation of these cells in culture and the means whereby this happened was shown to be that corresponding to organisation of a normal mouse embryo. Moreover these cells would participate extensively in normal development in combination with a normal embryo and give rise to adult mice.

These studies showed the close relationship between these "EC" cells and normal mouse embryos but it was not until 1981 after his return to Cambridge that together with Matt Kaufman he was able to isolate similar cells from normal mouse embryos. Subsequently they rapidly demonstrated, together with his student and post-doc Liz Robertson and student Allan Bradley, that these cells which became known as "Embryonic Stem Cells" (ES cells) were able to be used to fully regenerate fertile breeding mice from the tissue culture cells and that these could therefore carry mutations introduced and selected or screened for in culture. This is now the basis of all the mouse knockout and targeted genetic manipulation.

Since pioneering these fundamental developments which created new routes to experimental mammalian genetics and hence functional genomics, Sir Martin has been exploiting them using gene knockout and gene trap methods both for novel discovery and to create animal modes of human disease. From his laboratory came the first demonstration of gene therapy to cure the deficit in Cystic Fibrosis in the whole animal and recently, from a mutated mouse model, insights into the breast cancer gene BRCA2 function.

Sir Martin has published 124 scientific papers. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and a founder Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences. In 1993 he was awarded the Walter Cottman Fellowship and the William Bate Hardy Prizes. He was awarded the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 2001. In 2002 he was also awarded an honorary doctorate from Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, regarded as one of the world's foremost centres for medical and scientific training.

In 2007, together with Mario R. Capecchi and Oliver Smithies, Sir Martin was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries of principles for introducing specific gene modifications in mice by the use of embryonic stem cells".