Nobel prize awarded to Briton, Japanese for stem cell work

British researcher John Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka of Japan won this year’s Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine on Monday for discovering that mature, specialised cells of the body can be reprogrammed into stem cells – a discovery that scientists hope to turn into new treatments.

Scientists want to harness that reprogramming to create replacement tissues for treating diseases like Parkinson’s and diabetes, and for studying the roots of diseases in the labouratory.

The prize committee at Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute said the discovery has “revolutionised our understanding of how cells and organisms develop.”

Gurdon showed in 1962 – the year Yamanaka was born – that the DNA from specialised cells of frogs, like skin or intestinal cells, could be used to generate new tadpoles. That showed the DNA still had its ability to drive the formation of all cells of the body.

In 1997, the cloning of Dolly the sheep by other scientists showed that the same process Gurdon discovered in frogs would work in mammals.

More than 40 years after Gurdon’s discovery, in 2006, Yamanaka showed that a surprisingly simple recipe could turn mature cells back into primitive cells, which in turn could be prodded into different kinds of mature cells.