Shinya Yamanaka(left) and John B. Gurdon (right)NOBELPRIZE.ORGJohn Gurdon of the Gurdon Institute in Cambridge and Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University in Japan took home this year’s Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries of different ways in which the cells of an adult organism can return to an embryonic-like state. Gurdon became widely known as the “the godfather of cloning” after he published a landmark study in 1962 demonstrating that the nucleus of an adult frog cell could be transplanted into a frog egg whose nucleus had been removed to generate a viable, cloned tadpole. Yamanaka made a name for himself in 2006, when he discovered four genes that are capable of reprogramming an adult mouse cell into what are now known as induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells.
“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.”
This year’s Nobel Prize for Chemistry went to Robert Lefkowitz of Duke University and Brian K. Kobilka of Stanford for their work on the structure and function of cell surface receptors known as G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCR). “They have helped us to develop deeper insights in to the mechanisms of cell reactions and the molecular ...
