英日科学家因“细胞重新编程”获诺奖

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.
科学家过去认为，细胞的生长是不可逆的。我们始于一个受精卵，然后成为由不成熟、未分化的细胞组成的胚胎，再逐渐发育为由专门细胞构成的个体，包括血液、骨骼、肌肉和皮肤。

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.)
1962年，格登还在努力了解未分化的简单细胞是如何变成人体内所有其它细胞的，那时他就做了一项大胆的试验。格登从一枚青蛙卵子中移除DNA，再将从蝌蚪身上提取的成熟细胞的DNA放入这枚卵子内，后来该卵子发育成一只健康的克隆蝌蚪。(1996年克隆羊多莉的诞生也是用的这种方法。)

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.
格登接受采访时说，那个青蛙试验其实是在努力回答有关我们是如何形成的纯科学问题，当时并没有可预见的治疗益处。如今，79岁的格登是英国剑桥大学(Cambridge University)格登学院(Gurdon Institute)的一名教授。

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?
山中伸弥今年50岁，他出生的那年格登正在做青蛙试验，而他也终将思考一个相关问题：格登的重新编程技术能否在不用卵子的情况下完成？具体到人类试验上，这一点很难做到。

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.
山中伸弥在几年后得到了答案。他向世人证明，只需将四个基因引入一个成熟细胞，就可将该细胞转变为类胚胎状态。他首先用老鼠细胞成功做到这一点，然后在2007年又宣布用人类细胞成功完成了这一转变。他将那些细胞在试验室里依次培养为了心脏、神经和其它人类组织细胞。

'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.
山中伸弥在接受采访时说，没有格登的工作，我们永远不会在12年前着手这项有风险的项目。山中伸弥是日本京都大学(Kyoto University)教授兼美国旧金山格莱斯顿研究院(Gladstone Institutes)高级研究员。