Nobel Prize in Medicine for the British John B. Gurdon and Japanese Shinya Yamanaka

October 8, 2012

The Nobel Prize for Medicine 2012 was for Britain’s John B. Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka Japanese.

The scientific papers showed that ‘you can turn back the clock and reprogram differentiated adult cells and return them to their original state. “

The Swedish Academy: ‘Reprogramming these human cells, scientists created new opportunities to study diseases and develop diagnostic and therapeutic methods’.

Shinya Yamanaka showed that: “It was enough to insert four genes to transform a skin cell to behave like an embryonic. This new cell type that he called iPS, was the starting point in the laboratory to generate neurons, muscle cells, heart … or any of the more than 220 cell types of the human body. “

Geneticist John B. Gurdon: “He was the first to think of this change in concept by stating that ‘the specialization of cells is reversible’. It was hypothesized and also checked. He did it in frogs, by replacing the nucleus of a frog egg with the nucleus from a cell of the animal intestinal mature. That discovery allowed him to conclude that ‘the mature cell DNA still had all the information necessary to develop all the cells in the frog.’ “

This year, due to economic cutbacks, the prize is eight million kronor, about 930,000 euros, or 20% less than last year.