Post date: Dec 08, 2012 3:5:59 PM
This year's winners of the Nobel prize in medicine hold their traditional Nobel lectures about their award winning work.
STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN (DECEMBER 7, 2012)(REUTERS) - Nobel medicine laureates Briton John Gurdon and Japan's Shinya Yamanakaheld their traditional Nobel lectures on Friday (December 7).
The lectures are part of the the official Nobel Week programme of activities for the laureates ahead of the royal award ceremony on Monday (December 10).79-year-old Gurdon of the Gurdon Institute in Cambridge, and 50-year-old Yamanaka ofKyoto University, discovered ways to create tissue that would act like embryonic cells without the need to collect the cells from embryos.
"I think the interaction between egg and nucleus leading eventually to reprogramming can really be summarized as a battle between the egg and the nucleus, and at the moment I would say the egg is doing very well but the nucleus is slightly better, and we need to realise the full potential. We need to give the egg a little more help to try and reduce the remarkable resistance of the nucleus to being reprogrammed," Gurdon said at the lecture in Stockholm.
"It is a great great honour for me to be selected as one of the laureates of the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine this year. I am grateful to the Nobel Foundation and Karolinska Institute for having chosen me as one of the laureates," Yamanaka told the audience.
They will share the 1.2 million United States dollar prize for work Gurdon began 50 years ago and Yamanaka capped with a 2006 experiment that transformed the field of "regenerative medicine" - the search for ways to cure disease by growing healthy tissue.
All of the body starts as stem cells, before developing into tissue like skin, blood, nerves, muscle and bone. The big hope is that stem cells can grow to replace damaged tissue in cases from spinal cord injuries to Parkinson's disease.
Scientists once thought it was impossible to turn adult tissue back into stem cells. That meant new stem cells could only be created by taking them from embryos, which raised ethical objections that led to research bans in some countries.
As far back as 1962 Gurdon became the first scientist to clone an animal, making a healthy tadpole from the egg of a frog with DNA from another tadpole's intestinal cell. That showed that developed cells carry the information to make every cell in the body - decades before other scientists made world headlines by cloning the first mammal from adult DNA, Dolly the sheep.
More than 40 years later, Yamanaka produced mouse stem cells from adult mouse skin cells by inserting a small number of genes. His breakthrough effectively showed that the development that takes place in adult tissue could be reversed, turning adult tissue back into cells that behave like embryos.
Stem cells created from adult tissue are known as "induced pluripotency stem cells", or iPS cells. Because patients may one day be treated with stem cells from their own tissue, their bodies might be less likely to reject them.