John Hopkins claimed his first MotoGP pole after beating Shinya Nakano's time at the end of qualifying.
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The genetic approach to reprogramming, pioneered by Shinya Yamanaka who won the 2012 Nobel Prize in medicine for his work, allows human cells to be transformed back into an embryonic-like, pluripotent state.
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But as biologists have discovered in the past few years since iPSCs were first generated by Shinya Yamanaka in 2006, coaxing the cells to proliferate without acquiring mutations has proved to be a challenge.
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Then came a breakthrough in 2007, when Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University succeeded in reprogramming adult skin cells back to their embryonic state simply by dousing them in a concoction of four genetic factors and some growth media.
On Monday, the 2012 prize for medicine or physiology was awarded to John Gurdon from the UK and Shinya Yamanaka from Japan for changing adult cells into stem cells, which can become any other type of cell in the body.
Opponents of embryonic stem cell research, which involves destroying the donated embryos from which cell lines are derived, have long argued that the discovery of iPS cells in 2006 (for which Shinya Yamanaka was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine this past year) obviates the need for embryonic stem cell research.
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In related news, researcher Shinya Yamanaka in Japan has turned mouse skin cells into cells that are indistinguishable from the embryonic kind--meaning, that they can conceivably be turned into heart cells, liver cells or just about any other kind of cell scientists want to study or, eventually, use as a therapy.
On Monday, the 2012 prize for medicine or physiology was awarded to John Gurdon from the UK and Shinya Yamanaka from Japan for changing adult cells into stem cells, and on Tuesday the prize for physics was awarded to Serge Haroche of France and David Wineland of the US for their work in querying single light and matter particles.
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First came the remarkable work of Shinya Yamanaka at Kyoto University, who showed it was possible, by activating just four genes, to take a mature cell (he used a bit of skin but other cells would work) and turn it into the equivalent of an embryonic stem cell with the potential to become any other cell in the body of mouse or human.
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