08-10-2012 10:32 British scientist Sir John Gurdon, along with Shinya Yamanaka from Japan, have jointly been awarded the Nobel prize for medicine for their work on stem cell research. Their research has uncovered a way to transform adult cells to an embryonic-like stage, that could lead in the future to damaged body tissue being able to be regrown. Gurdon held a news conference in London to discuss the research he has been working on for over 50 years. "In the 1950's we really didn't know whether all your different cells had the same genes or they don't and that was the purpose of the experiments I was doing. And the outcome was that they do. So that means that in principle you should be able to derive any one kind of cell from another, because they have all got the same genes, that was I think the contribution I made at that time," he said. Gurdon also joked that at school he was told by his teachers to stop studying science. He said, "I was at a school where you did no science until the age of 15, and then I did one term of science and then the schoolmaster wrote the report, the details of which I can't quite remember, but the main gist of it was that he had heard that Gurdon was interested in doing science and that this was a completely ridiculous idea, because there was no hope whatever of my doing science and anytime spent on it would be a total waste of time, both on my part and the part of the person having to teach him. So that completely terminated my science at school." Gurdon ...

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British scientist wins Nobel Prize for Stem Cell work - Video

04-10-2012 14:05 What is a stem cell? How are they made? How does The Parkinson's Institute use them to push towards a cure for Parkinson's disease? We are pleased to share with you the work of The Schuele and Nichols Laboratories at The Parkinson's Institute. Drs. Schuele and Nichols answer these questions, talk about their laboratory work and share how it's making a difference in the PD world. To learn more about the Schuele or Nichols lab, visit our website at http://www.thepi.org.

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Stem Cell Research at The Parkinson's Institute - Video

Two scientists who each made a major discovery four decades apart share the science world's prestigious award

On Monday, the Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to two biologists for their breakthroughs in the field of stem-cell research two discoveries that happened 44 years apart. The honors go to Britain's Sir John B. Gurdon and Japan's Shinya Yamanaka for their pioneering work with the life-shaping cells, which can be reprogrammed to create any kind of tissue in the body. Here, a concise guide to Gurdon and Yamanaka's contributions to the field of medicine:

What were they awarded the prize for? Both discoveries "concern the manipulation of living cells," says Nicholas Wade at The New York Times, which lies "at the heart of the techniques for cloning animals" and curing a wide variety of diseases, including Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. The "primitive cells" are incredibly malleable, and can be programmed to mature into other tissues, including skin, vital organs, and more.

Where do stem cells typically come from? Embryonic stem cells are usually taken from early-stage human embryos, with the embryos being destroyed in the process. That's why stem-cell research is fraught with religious and moral issues, with critics often arguing that scientists are overstepping their boundaries by manipulating stem cells. The next generation of researchers, building upon the body of work started by Gurdon and Yamanaka, are looking into new techniques that sidestep ethical considerations by taking stem cells from other sources.

Specifically, what kind of work did Dr. Gurdon do? In 1962, the year Yamanaka was born,Gurdon demonstrated that the DNA in frog tissue could be used to generate a fresh batch of tadpoles, says Karl Ritterlouise Nordstrom of The Associated Press. Gurdon's technique involved extracting the frog's chromosomes from an adult intestinal cell and injecting it into an empty frog egg, which was able to "reprogram" the new nucleus to switch its directive over to tadpole-making.At first his work was "greeted with skepticism,"says theTimes' Wade, because it "contradicted the textbook dogma" that mature cells are irrevocably set in their specific functions. The process itself was little understood, and it wasn't until more than four decades later in Dr. Yamanaka's labs that the reason behind this reprogramming was finally revealed.

And what did Dr. Yamanakafind? In 2006, Dr. Yamanaka's research showed that four specific genes control the agents in the egg. Using mice, Yamanaka discovered that mature skin cells could be reprogrammed to become any other kind of cell, which he called inducted pluripotent stem cells (iPS) basically the equivalent of embryonic stem cells. iPS cells can be taken from adult nerve, heart, or liver cells, and unlike their embryonic cousins, could be taken without destroying human embryos.

What do the scientists getfor their discoveries? Gurdon, 79, and Yamanaka, 50, will share the$1.2 million prize for their work, which the Nobel committee says has "revolutionized our understanding of how cells and organisms develop." In an interview,Dr. Yamanaka said,"My goal, all my life, is to bring this technology... to the bedside, to patients, to clinics." When asked if he planned to celebrate, Dr. Gurdon said he was invited to drinks at 6 o'clock. "I intend to attend those drinks," he dryly told the AP.

Sources: AFP, The Associated Press, LiveScience, The New York Times

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The stem-cell breakthroughs that won the Nobel Prize: A guide

Not a lot has been said about embryonic stem-cell research in this presidential campaign, in stark contrast to previous years when this issue stood prominently with marriage equality in the culture wars of politics. President Obama supports taxpayer-funded embryonic stem-cell research. GOP nominee Mitt Romney opposes it. Here's a nuanced account of Romney's position.

But the issue is certain to come up now that the 2012 Nobel Prize in medicine is going to John Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka for their groundbreaking discovery that cells in the body can be reprogrammed and customized for treatments of diseases, including Parkinson's and diabetes.

The political gamechanger is that the work of the British researcher and the Japanese scientist paved the way to making the equivalent of embryonic stem cells without using actual embryonic cells. The discovery sidesteps the ethical and political questions that have plagued researchers and Congress. Embryos are destroyed when stem cells are extracted from them. That extraction is considered by those who oppose abortion rights to be tantamount to taking a life. On those grounds they oppose embryonic stem-cell research. I disagree with that viewpoint because a) I'm pro-choice and support a woman's right to prevent conception or terminate it and b) stem-cell researchers rely on discarded embryonic stem cells from fertility clinics. Those embryos were not going to create life.

This Seattle Times editorial and this one urged then-President George W. Bush to loosen restrictions on embryonic stem-cell research. President Obama resumed federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research.

In addition to a great leap for stem-cell research, I find the two men's lives to offer a poignant narrative about scientific research's long arc. Gurdon, 79, had been best known for his 1962 discovery that DNA from specialized cells of frogs, like skin or intestinal cells, could create new tadpoles. That discovery cemented DNA's ability to drive the formation of all cells of the body. And that same year, Yamanaka was born. He is now 50.

The cells research that 50 years ago did not seem to have medical value, does now. Congratulations to two men, a generation apart but united in their determination to uncover the huge potential of stem cells.

AP Photo/Kyodo News 2008

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Nobel Prize could ease the politics of embryonic stem cell research

John Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday for their research on resetting cells to their earliest developmental stages.The work has yet to yield a clear breakthrough in medical treatment, but it has revolutionized scientists ability to study both normal and diseased development.

Gurdon, 79, performed his seminal work in the late 1950s and early 1960sa good deal of it before Yamanaka was born. In his most famous study, Gurdon showed that replacing the nucleus of an adult cell with the nucleus of an embryonic cell reset the adult cell to an embryonic state: Many of the cells became tadpoles. This strongly suggested that embryonic-state DNA and the molecules that controlled gene expression in the nucleus were sufficient to make a cell "pluripotent" againor capable of turning into any type of tissue in the body.

Some40 years later, Yamanaka took this further by showing that adult mouse skin cells could be reset to their embryonic state just by adding a set of genes into the cells nuclei, and he later reduced this number to just four genes. The cells are now referred to as induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells, and are a common tool in the study of development and disease.

With Yamanakas discovery, researchers suddenly had a way of studying pluripotent stem cells without destroying embryosa limitation that had caused countless headaches at the time of Yamanakas breakthrough, as President George W. Bush had instituted severe limitations on such research.

Since Yamanakas seminal finding, researchers have used the approach to demonstrate some stunning feats: They have turned the skin cells of people who have Parkinsons disease into disease in a dish models that allow them to watch the development of the disease over time and to observe what genes go wrong when and why, and, just last week, a team of scientists published research that used the approach to turn mouse skin cells back into mouse eggs, which then produced baby mice.

The technique has not been without complications: Because one of the four genes is also highly implicated in cancer, the iPS cells are more likely to become cancerous than true embryonic stem cells. The issue has slowed research in the field.

Today, Gurdon works at the Gurdon Institute in Cambridge, England, which he founded, and Yamanaka has appointments at UC San Franciscos Gladstone Institute and at Kyoto University.

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Nobel Prize goes to pioneers of induced stem cell research

By: Jenny Marder

Nobel Prize winner Sir John Gurdon talks to reporters on Oct. 8, 2012 in London. Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka from Japan have both been awarded the Nobel prize for medicine or physiology for their work as pioneers of stem cell research. Photo by Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images.

In 1962, John B. Gurdon of the United Kingdom discovered that a cell removed from the gut of a frog contained all the genetic information necessary to create the whole frog. More than 40 years later, Shinya Yamanaka of Japan found that by introducing a few genes to a mature mouse cell, he could reprogram it into a stem cell, capable of developing into any cell in the body.

Gurdon and Yamanaka share this year's Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology for their work in cellular reprogramming, 50 years after Gurdon's initial discovery. Their work in stem cells has led to a wave of advances, from cloning animals to allowing scientists to create embryonic cells without having to destroy embryos.

Gurdon was still a graduate student when he first transplanted genetic information from the nucleus of an intestinal cell of one frog into the fertilized egg cell of another whose own nucleus had been removed. That cell was able to reprogram and develop into a tadpole, proving that even mature, specialized cells have all the information needed to transform an embryo into an adult.

He relied on a technique called nuclear transfer to transplant the nuclei. The discovery flew in the face of established opinion, since other more established scientists hadn't been able to successfully make such a transfer, and it was thought then that a specialized cell is irreversibly tied to its fate.

"We had to go through a few years, in a sense, of letting the results sink in," Gurdon said in an early morning interview with the Nobel committee.

The same year that discovery was published, Yamanaka was born. And 40 years later, he took the science a big step farther. His research identified the four genes that made it possible to reverse mature stem cells into their embryonic state without using nuclear transfer. The "induced pluripotent embryonic stem cells" could then go on to become nerve cells, heart cells, gut cells.

That finding opened the possibility for skin cells to be reversed to embryonic cells and then reprogrammed into nerve, heart or other tissue cells for medical uses and disease treatment. Such reprogrammed cells have not yet been used to treat patients.

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Stem Cell Discovery Secures Nobel Prize