These discoveries have provided new tools for scientists around the world and led to remarkable progress in many areas of medicine."
—The Nobel Assembly
The Nobel Assembly has today announced that Professor Sir John Gurdon has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for 2012, along with Professor Shinya Yamanaka, for their ground-breaking work which proved that mature cells can be reprogrammed to become immature stem cells capable of developing into all tissues of the body.
The Assembly stated that their work “revolutionised our understanding of how cells and organisms develop” and that their discoveries “have completely changed our view of the development and cellular specialisation.”
It was previously thought that once a cell reached a level of maturity to become specialised, creating the various tissues that make up a body, it was an irreversible, one-way process – that the fate of the cell is permanently locked.
Gurdon discovered in 1962 that the specialisation of cells is in fact reversible by eliminating the nucleus of a frog egg cell and replacing it with the nucleus from an already mature and specialised cell lifted from a tadpole.
The modified frog egg developed into a normal tadpole, proving that the mature cell still contained all necessary DNA to develop all cells in the frog – effectively cloning the tadpole.
As the Nobel Assembly points out, he thus proved that the nucleus of the mature cell “had not lost its capacity to drive development to a fully functional organism.” This discovery that a mature cell does not have to be confined forever to its specialised state revolutionised cell biology, leading to the establishment of new research areas and eventually the cloning of mammals.
“I am immensely honoured to be awarded this spectacular recognition, and delighted to be due to receive it with Shinya Yamanaka, whose work has brought the whole field within the realistic expectation of therapeutic benefits,” said Gurdon.
“I am of course most enormously grateful to those colleagues who have worked with me, at various times over the last half century. It is particularly pleasing to see how purely basic research, originally aimed at testing the genetic identity of different cell types in the body, has turned out to have clear human health prospects.”
The Wellcome Trust/Cancer Research UK Institute – part of the University of Cambridge – where Gurdon was formerly chairman, was renamed the Gurdon Institute in 2004, in honour of Gurdon’s extraordinary achievements in the field of developmental and cancer biology.
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Image: John Gurdon
Credit: Wellcome Trust