Nobel Prize winners 2012Physiology/Medicine

Compilation from News gallery of Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/2012-nobel-laureates/2012/10/08/c5406a9e-1179-11e2-ba83-a7a396e6b2a7_gallery.html

• The Nobel Prize announcements began Monday with the award in medicine, which was given to John Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka . The prize for physics will be awarded on Tuesday, followed by chemistry on Wednesday and literature on Thursday. The Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences will follow on Monday, Oct. 15.

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• Oct. 8, 2012 • Developmental biologist Sir John Gurdon attends a news conference after

winning the Nobel Prize for medicine in London. The British scientist shared the prize with Japanese scientist Shinya Yamanaka for separate experiments conducted almost 50 years apart. In 1962, Gurdon wowed the world of biology by cloning a frog via a clever technique: He transplanted the genetic material from an intestinal cell of one frog into an egg cell from another. The egg developed into a tadpole, showing that ordinary cells contain the entire genetic instruction manual for whole organism.

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• Gurdon, 79, poses for photographs at a press conference after being awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine in London. Gurdon is an emeritus professor at Cambridge University who conducts research at a Cambridge institute that bears his name; he was knighted in 1995 for his work in developmental biology. His frog experiments a half-century ago showed that scientists “should be able to derive any one kind of cell from another, because they’ve all got the same genes,” Gurdon said at the news briefing.

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• Sept. 1, 2008 • Japanese scientist Shinya Yamanaka

— seen at Kyoto University’s Institute for Frontier Medical Science in 2008 — received the Nobel Prize in medicine. In 2006 and 2007, Yamanaka extended the insights provided by Gurdon’s earlier research by turning back time on individual cells from both mice and humans. By sprinkling four genes on ordinary skin cells, Yamanaka discovered a virtual fountain of youth: Any cell, he found, could be reverted to an early embryonic state.

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• Professor Yamanaka —is a professor at Kyoto University in Kyoto, Japan. On Monday, Yamanaka credited his co-laureate for making his advances possible. “This field has a long history starting with John Gurdon,” he said in a brief telephone interview posted on the Nobel Prize Web site. Yamanaka noted he was born in 1962 — the year Gurdon published his pivotal frog experiments. Washington Post

• This image shows “induced” pluripotent stem (iPS) cells derived from adult human dermal fibroblasts. Like embryonic cells, these cells can be grown into many other types of tissues, but without having to destroy any embryos. The breakthrough offered hope that someday skin cells could be harvested from a patient, sent back in time to an embryonic state and then grown into replacement tissues such as heart muscle or nerve cells. A huge global research effort is now working to develop iPS cells into treatments for heart disease, some forms of blindness, Parkinson’s disease and many other disorders. Washington Post

• The mouse in the upper right was born from an egg cell that was made from iPS cells at Kyoto University.

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