2 researchers awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize for stem cell research

The British and Japanese researchers namely Sir John Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka have been awarded 2012 Nobel Prize for stem cell research.

The work of both the researchers has caught the attention of the most famous awards company in the world.

These researchers performed research in nuclear programming, a process that instructs adult cells to form early stem cells which can be then used to form any type of tissue.

A committee at Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute awarded the prize to Gurdon, whose work included taking intestinal samples to clone frogs and Yamanaka, whose work altered genes to reprogram cells.

Mr. John Gurdon showed in his research that genetic information inside the cell gleaned from the intestines of a frog had all the information needed for creating a whole new frog.

 Mr. Yamanaka added four genes to adult skin cells of mice which transformed them into stem cells, which then become specialized cells or iPS cells.

“Such discoveries have provided new tools for scientists around the world and led to remarkable progress in many areas of medicine,” said the Nobel Prize Committee. It also stated, “Gurdon and Yamanaka’s research could revolutionize modern medicine just by using a sample of someone’s skin to create stem cells, that can in turn, hopefully cure disease. Sir Gurdon runs the Gurdon Institute at Cambridge University.

Furthermore, Yamanaka is a professor at Kyoto University in Japan and also works at UCSF. He is also Director of the Center for IPS Cell Research and Application and also a principal investigator at the Institute for Integrated Cell-Material Sciences.