By GAUTAM NAIK 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. 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 pav