Shinya Yamanaka(left) and John B. Gurdon (right), Nobel Prize.orgJohn Gurdon of the Gurdon Institute in Cambridge and Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University in Japan have won the 2012 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for finding that cells of an adult organism—once thought be terminally locked into their developed state—can start anew. The discoveries, awarded the prize this morning (October 8) by The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, have ignited research in areas ranging from cloning to cancer treatment.
“Gurdon and Yamanaka fundamentally changed the way we all think about the specialized state of cells,” George Daley, director of the Stem Cell Transplantation Program at the Harvard Medical School, wrote in an email to The Scientist. “Collectively they taught us that the identity of a cell can be re-engineered—that an adult cell can be reverted to its embryonic state. This paradigm-shifting concept has opened up whole new avenues of research.”
Gurdon, sometimes referred to as the “the godfather of cloning,” published a landmark study in the Journal of Embryology and Experimental Morphology in 1962, showing that implanting the nucleus of an adult frog cell into a frog egg that had had its nucleus removed could result in a functional, cloned tadpole.1 Though widely scrutinized ...
