Stem Cell Research Wins Medicine Nobel

Shino Yamanaka, left, and John Gurdon.

Shino Yamanaka of Kyoto University in Japan was a shoo-in for the 2012 Nobel Prize in Medicine. But in a surprising twist, he shared it with a researcher who did his award-winning work 50 years ago.

In 2007 Yamanaka discovered that all human cells have a set of genetic switches, four points on the genome, that can be tweaked to create pluripotent stem cells. These can create all other types of cells, potentially allowing a scientist to make skin grafts or whole organs out of a patient?s own cells, eliminating the risk of tissue rejection. Going into the 2012 Nobel week he was one of the favorites to take the medicine prize.

Yamanaka shares the Nobel Prize with John Gurdon for work Gurdon did at the University of Oxford. The British scientist first theorized in 1962 that cell specialization could be reversed, and that a mature cell of any kind, a skin cell, for example, was not doomed to die a skin cell. He replaced the nucleus of a frog egg cell with a nucleus from an adult frog?s intestinal cell and found that a normal tadpole developed ? all the genetic information needed to form a whole animal was still contained in the specialized adult cell.

Yamanaka?s research built upon Gurdon?s 1962 discoveries, though few predicted the two would share this award. The field of regenerative medicine is still in its infancy, but could revolutionize the way we think about healing, aging, and death.

Source: http://www.popularmechanics.com/how-to/blog/stem-cell-research-wins-medicine-nobel-13506802?src=rss

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