Stem-Cell Scientists Win Nobel Prize

Two stem-cell researchers have won this year's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their groundbreaking work in cellular reprogramming, a technique that unleashed a wave of advances in biology, from cloning to the possible treatment of diseases using a patient's own cells.
Experiments by John B. Gurdon of the United Kingdom and Shinya Yamanaka of Japan showed that mature cells taken from the body could be changed to an embryonic-like state in a laboratory dish, a head-spinning discovery that is the biological equivalent of turning back time.

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Japanese scientist Shinya Yamanaka.

 

 EPA/Cambridge University

British scientist John B. Gurdon.

Their work "has changed the accepted dogma" that mature cells are condemned to exist in a specialized state, said Martin Evans, a British stem-cell pioneer who shared the 2007 Nobel Prize for medicine, in an interview.
Cellular reprogramming triggered the rewriting of biology textbooks and spawned thousands of new experiments in labs around the world. It led to the first cloned animal—a frog—and to the first cloned mammal, Dolly the sheep. It also paved the way for deriving embryonic-like stem cells without destroying human embryos, sidestepping an ethically contentious approach.
Once cellular reprogramming is used to turn mature cells into embryonic-like ones, those cells can be further manipulated and turned into heart, nerve, muscle and virtually all other tissues types. This freshly made tissue—from an Alzheimer's patient, for example—could be inexpensively grown and studied in a lab dish.
Drug firms have already started to test drugs on human tissue made through reprogramming. Next year, fresh retinal cells derived in this way will be transplanted into people for the first time, in a Japanese trial for patients with an eye disease known as macular degeneration.
Scientists used to believe the fate of our cells was a one-way trip. We start as a fertilized egg; become an embryo consisting of immature, undifferentiated cells; then gradually develop into a body of specialist cells, including blood, bone, muscle and skin.

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Related Reading

• A Lone Wolf: Far From the Stem Cell Wars, a Scientist Makes Big Advance (Aug. 10, 2007)
• Advance in Stem-Cell Work Avoids Destroying Embryos (Nov. 21, 2007)
• Japan Notches a Nobel

In 1962, Dr. Gurdon, while trying to understand how simple, undifferentiated cells became all the other cells in the body, performed an audacious experiment. He removed the DNA from a frog egg and replaced it with the DNA of a mature cell taken from a tadpole. The egg developed into a healthy, cloned tadpole. (The same approach would be used to create Dolly the sheep in 1996.)
The frog experiment was an effort to answer "a pure scientific question about how we came to be formed. There was no foreseeable therapeutic benefit," said Dr. Gurdon in an interview. Now 79, Dr. Gurdon is a professor at the Gurdon Institute, part of Cambridge University.
Dr. Yamanaka, 50, was born in the year Dr. Gurdon did his frog experiment. Dr. Yamanaka would eventually ponder a related question: Could the Gurdon reprogramming trick be done without using eggs—which, in human cases, can be hard to come by?
Dr. Yamanaka had the answer a few years later. He demonstrated that by adding just four genes to a mature cell, he could turn it into an embryonic-like state. He first achieved this with mouse cells, and in 2007 he reported the same result for human cells. He transformed those cells, in turn, into heart, nerve and other human tissue in a lab.

"Without [Dr. Gurdon's] work we would never have started this risky project 12 years ago," said Dr. Yamanaka, who is a professor at Kyoto University and affiliated with the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco, in an interview.
Since Dr. Yamanaka's breakthrough, many labs have altered how they do stem-cell research. Some years ago, Ian Wilmut, the scientist who created Dolly the sheep, abandoned a cloning-based approach in favor of the Yamanaka method. Last week, Japanese scientists said they used the Yamanaka technique to make mouse eggs.
Though approaching 80, Dr. Gurdon remains as busy as before. He was at his lab at 8.30 a.m. Monday when someone from the Nobel committee called with the news. Dr. Gurdon said he intends to keep plugging away "because I haven't answered the question I am fully trying to answer: What is the mechanism that the egg uses to reverse differentiation?"

Haroche, Wineland Win Nobel Physics Prize

Serge Haroche of France and David J. Wineland of the U.S. shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for devising clever laboratory experiments that made it possible to control ghostly quantum particles, an achievement that many theoretical physicists believed could never be done.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

European Pressphoto Agency

A photo of physicist David J. Wineland from March 2001.

The work has already led to the creation of clocks more than 100 times as precise as existing cesium clocks. More important, perhaps, their work has laid the groundwork for a possible quantum computer, a superfast-machine that—if it ever can be built—would leave today's speediest computers in the dust.
"Through their ingenious laboratory methods Haroche and Wineland together with their research groups have managed to measure and control very fragile quantum states, which were previously thought inaccessible for direct observation," the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in a news release. The academy awards the Nobel Prize.
Dr. Haroche, born in 1944, is a professor at the Collège de France and École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Dr. Wineland, also born in 1944, is a physicist at the U.S. Department of Commerce's National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Colorado in Boulder, Colo.
Quantum particles flit around in a realm that is microscopic and mysterious. You could put two such particles a million miles apart without any direct contact, and yet they can somehow read and affect the properties of each other. Such particles can also exist in several states simultaneously—known as superposition—which is a bit like being in two places at the same time.
Single quantum particles cannot thus be easily separated from their surrounding environment; as soon as they interact with the outside world, they abandon their spooky properties. It's no wonder that in this tenuous world, the possibility of examining, controlling and counting quantum particles had long seemed remote if not impossible.
But Dr. Haroche and Dr. Wineland were able to crack the problem independently, though they approached the challenge in somewhat different ways.
Dr. Haroche controls photons—quantum particles of light—with mirrors. In his Paris lab, photons bounce back and forth between two supercooled, superconducting mirrors for a 10th of a second—a long time in quantum terms.

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Dr. Haroche then zaps an atom into this trap. The interaction between the atom and the photon reveals the presence of the photon. With the help of some more experimental skulduggery, many elusive photons can be measured and counted this way, without destroying them.
At his lab in Boulder, Dr. Wineland traps ions—electrically charged atoms—by surrounding them with electric fields. The experiment is done in an extremely low-temperature vacuum. With the help of a laser, the ion is prodded into a superposition state—two states at one time—and the quantum behavior can thus be studied.
Dr. Wineland's group has used the ion-trap setup to build a clock that is 100 times more accurate than the cesium-based clocks that are currently the standard for measuring time. The ion trap could also be the basis of a quantum computer.
Today's computers encode data in binary digits, ones and zeros. A quantum machine would exploit quantum properties—such as the superposition states—to represent data and for the basis of computing operations. Some very basic calculations using quantum phenomena have already been done.
But there's a huge catch: The quantum information that's the basis for the high-speed calculations has to be isolated from the outside world, so as not to destroy the quantum properties; at the same time, the machine has to somehow communicate and pass on the results of its number-crunching to the outside world.
Based on the experiments of Dr. Wineland and Dr. Haroche, scientists are now trying to figure out how to resolve that paradox.
"Perhaps the quantum computer will change our everyday lives in this century in the same radical way as the classical computer did in the last century," the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.