newjerseynewsroom.com

BY BOB HOLT

NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM

In 1962, British researcher John Gurdon discovered that DNA from specialized cells of tadpoles could be used to clone more tadpoles, earning a 2012 Nobel Prize.

Co-winner of the Nobel, Shinya Yamanaka of Japan, was born in 1962.

WSJ.com reports that the efforts of the two stem cell researchers allowed them to share the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work in cellular reprogramming. Their experiments have shown that mature cells taken from the body can be transformed into embryonic-like cells in a lab dish.

After the cells achieve an embryonic form, they can be turned into heart, nerve, muscle and other tissues that can be grown at minimal expense, and studied in the lab container.

According to Mail Online, in 1962, Gurdon learned that cells in the intestines of a frog contained enough genetic information to develop the rest of its body, and he was able to clone another frog. Gurdon’s work led to the cloning of Dolly the sheep in 1997, the first cloned mammal.

Yamanaka made a similar discovery in 2006, finding that reprogramming skin cells in mice can turn that cell back into an embryo-like state. He created induced pluripotent stem cells in the mice, and in humans a year later.

"If someone has Alzheimer's, we can't take a biopsy of the brain," said Dr. Deepak Srivastava, director of the Roddenberry Center for Stem Cell Biology and Medicine in San Francisco, according to the Los Angeles Times. "But we can turn a skin cell into an iPS cell, and study that."

Bloomberg Businessweek reported that in Japan, scientists plan to use the iPS cells in testing among human patients with macular degeneration, a disease in which the retina becomes damaged, according to Yamanaka.