Gurdon, Yamanaka win Nobel medicine prize

British researcher John Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka of Japan won this year’s Nobel Prize in 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 the reprogramming to create replacement tissues for treating diseases like Parkinson’s and for studying the roots of diseases in the laboratory.

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

Gurdon showed in 1962 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.

More than 40 years later, 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.

Basically, the primitive cells were the equivalent of embryonic stem cells, which had been embroiled in controversy because to get human embryonic cells, human embryos had to be destroyed. Yamanaka’s method provided a way to get such primitive cells without destroying embryos.