Shinya Yamanaka and Sir John B. Gurdon Win the Nobel Prize in Medicine

Congratulations to Shinya Yamanaka and Sir John B. Gurdon for winning the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine! They kick-off this year's Nobel Prize season with their amazing discovery that mature, specialized cells can be reprogrammed to become immature stem cells. In 1962, John B. Gurdon replaced the nucleus of an egg cell of a frog with the nucleus of an intestinal cell. The modified egg cell developed into a normal tadpole, clearly demonstrating that the DNA of specialized cells still contain the information necessary to develop into tissue cell in the frog. More than 40 years later, Shinya Yamanaka introduced a few genes into the cells of mice and reprogrammed them to become pluripotent stem cells, which can develop into any type of cell in the body. The medical potential of their discoveries cannot be overstated. The ability to take tissue cells from an organism and then culture them into a different type of cell opens new avenues to treat diseases and injury that may be untreatable otherwise. For making a discovery that could unlock the hidden potential of our cells, Shinya Yamanaka and Sir John B. Gurdon truly deserve the Nobel Prize in Medicine. The original press release announcing their award can be found here. Tomorrow, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics will be announced. We're definitely looking forward to learning who the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences will recognize for their accomplishments in Physics. We'll be covering the announcement here, but feel free to speculate about who's research will win the prize in the comments below.