<img alt=“flu.JPG” src=https://www.nia.nih.gov/NR/rdonlyres/DD3B66AD-24C0-414B-84DF-1D0E13060FA7/3964/ch05_stemcells.jpg" border=“0” align=“right” hspace=“10px”/>One of the first researchers to clone animals and another who first reprogrammed skin into stem cells have been awarded the 2009 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award — a $250,000 accolade that is often seen as a prelude to a Nobel Prize.
John Gurdon, a developmental biologist at the University of Cambridge, UK, was the first to show that the vast majority of the body’s cells retain the ability to become any other cell type even after they have committed to a particular developmental fate. In 1962, Gurdon, then at Oxford University, transferred the nucleus of an adult intestinal cell into a hollowed out egg cell of the South African clawed frog, Xenopus laevis, to create the first cloned animal. This work paved the way for the cloning of other animals including Dolly the sheep by the technique known as somatic cell nuclear transfer.
More than four decades later, Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University in Japan and the Gladstone Institute in San Francisco, California, showed that the developmental clock could be turned back on cells even without the use of eggs. In 2006, Yamanaka introduced four genes — which have come to be known as the “Yamanaka factors” — into mouse skin cells to transform them into induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells, which are almost indistinguishable from embryonic stem cells. A year later, Yamanaka achieved the same feat in human cells.
“We did it by transferring the nucleus of a cell,” Gurdon told Bloomberg. “Amazingly, [Yamanaka] does it by adding genes to the cells and some of them go back to being embryo cells.” After his experiment, Gurdon foresaw the successful cloning of mammals, “but I did not expect it would be possible to do what Yamanaka did,” he said.
Notably absent from the Lasker list was the first mammalian clone creator, Ian Wilmut of the University of Edinburgh, UK, who cloned Dolly in 1996. The Lasker committee might have judged Wilmut’s a technical rather than conceptual step forward. Or they might have chosen to steer clear of the controversy over just how much credit Wilmut personally deserves. Last year, four former colleagues urged Queen Elizabeth to withdraw Wilmut’s knighthood, alleging that Sir Ian was a “self-confessed charlatan” who lacked the scientific understanding to achieve the job himself and did not properly acknowledge the accomplishments of his collaborators. (Times)
Rounding out the Lasker list: The clinical medical research award went to three scientists — Brian Druker of Oregon Health & Science University in Portland, Charles Sawyers of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, and Nicholas Lydon, who worked for Novartis — for discovering the drug Gleevec (imatinib mesylate), which turned several cancers into manageable diseases. The public service award recognized New York mayor Michael Bloomberg for his campaign to stop smoking and promote healthy eating. (Lasker press release)
Image: National Institute on Ageing