2012 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

The 2012 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Sir John B. Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka. The prize was announced by the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm on 8 October 2012.

The citation

The citation reads: "for the discovery that mature cells can be reprogrammed to become pluripotent". They share the prize equally.

The laureates

Sir John B. Gurdon was born in 1933 in Dippenhall, United Kingdom, and is affiliated with Gurdon Institute, Cambridge. Shinya Yamanaka was born in 1962 in Osaka, Japan, and is affiliated with Kyoto University, Kyoto and Gladstone Institutes, San Francisco.

Why it matters

Gurdon showed in the 1960s that the nucleus of a mature frog cell could be used to create a new frog, and Yamanaka found in 2006 how to turn adult cells back into stem cells. Gurdon was educated at Eton and Oxford and works in Cambridge.

The prize

The prize is worth 8 million Swedish kronor, divided between the laureates. It will be presented at a ceremony in Stockholm on 10 December, the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite whose will founded the prizes in 1895.