John B. Gurdon, a
developmental biologist at the Wellcome Trust/Cancer Research UK
Gurdon Institute at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom,
and Shinya Yamanaka, a stem cell researcher
at Kyoto University in Japan and the Gladstone Institute at the
University of California, San Francisco, have won the prize for their
discovery that mature
cells can be reprogrammed to resemble the versatile cells of a very
early embryo. These so-called pluripotent cells have the ability to
become any of the
body's tissues.
In normal development, cells mature from their pluripotent state into
various specialized cell types—a neuron, muscle cell, or skin cell, for
example. For
many years, developmental biologists thought that the cellular
maturation process was irreversible. In 1962, however, John Gurdon,
working at the University of Oxford, showed that under the right
conditions, a mature cell nucleus could become developmentally young
again. He replaced the nucleus of a frog egg
with a nucleus taken from a cell in a tadpole's intestine. In a few
cases, the egg cell was able to "reprogram" the DNA in the tadpole
nucleus and the egg cell developed
into an adult frog—the first animals cloned from mature cells.
(Source: www.sciencemag.org)
