SIR JOHN B. GURDON: SOMATIC CELL NUCLEAR TRANSFER: MEMORY OF THE PAST VERSUS HOPE FOR THE FUTURE

The British developmental biologist Sir John B. Gurdon was
awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine „for the
discovery that mature cells can be reprogrammed to become
pluripotent.” As early as in 1962, Gurdon published his groundbreaking
results from his experiments with frogs, which, in the
beginning, were skeptically reviewed by other researchers of the
time. For his studies, Gurdon removed the nucleus of fertilized
egg cells from a frog and replaced it with the nucleus of cells
taken from a tadpole‘s intestine. Some of these modifi ed egg
cells grew into new frogs. With a frog cloned from an intestine’s
nucleus, Gurdon found the prove that the mature cell, just as
embryonic stem cells, still contain the genetic information needed
to form all types of cells. This pioneering study was supposed to
become the fundamental work for stem cell research. Sir John
Gurdon shares his Nobel Prize with the Japanese stem cell
researcher Shinya Yamanaka, who was the fi rst to generate
induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells) in 2006.