A British scientist who played a key role in the development of stem cell research is to share the Nobel Prize for medicine with a Japanese scientist, it was announced yesterday.
Sir John Gurdon is now 79 but in 1962 he proved that the specialisation of cells could be reversed.
His fellow prize winner Professor Shinya Yamanaka, from Japan, was born in 1962 and proved some 40 years later how gene treatments could be used to turn mature cells into primitive cells.
Sir John has an institute named after him in Cambridge, UK, and was a professor at the university’s Magdalene College. He had started his career as a student of classics.
The researchers will share a prize of nearly a million Euros between them.
The Nobel Assembly was meeting at its home at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden, yesterday.
A spokesman said the two researchers had created "new opportunities to study diseases and develop methods for diagnosis and therapy."
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