This year's winners of Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology have been announced today. The prize is shared by John B. Gurdon (Born: 1933, Dippenhall, United Kingdom, Affiliation at the time of the award: Gurdon Institute, Cambridge, United Kingdom) and Shinya Yamanaka (Born September 4, 1962 in Higashiōsaka, Japan)From the Nobel Prize press release:
John B. Gurdon discovered in 1962 that the specialisation of cells is reversible. In a classic experiment, he replaced the immature cell nucleus in an egg cell of a frog with the nucleus from a mature intestinal cell. This modified egg cell developed into a normal tadpole. The DNA of the mature cell still had all the information needed to develop all cells in the frog.
Shinya Yamanaka discovered more than 40 years later, in 2006, how intact mature cells in mice could be reprogrammed to become immature stem cells. Surprisingly, by introducing only a few genes, he could reprogram mature cells to become pluripotent stem cells, i.e. immature cells that are able to develop into all types of cells in the body.
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