John Murdoch Mitchison (11 June 1922, Oxford – 17 March 2011, Edinburgh) was a British zoologist.

[3] Mitchison went to Winchester College and Trinity College, Cambridge, later becoming Professor of Zoology at Edinburgh University in 1963 after working there for a decade.

[4] He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1978.

[5][6] Considered a pioneer in the area of cellular biology, Mitchison developed the yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe as a model system to study the mechanisms and kinetics of growth and the cell cycle.

[7][8][9][10] He was an academic advisor to the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology recipient Paul Nurse.