The Nobel Prize gives scientists a rare opportunity to reach the public, and one of Monday's winners of the Nobel Prize in Physiology of Medicine wasted no time seizing that opportunity, according to a story by Tan EE Lyn of Reuters. "Nobel laureate Shinya Yamanaka warned patients on Tuesday about unproven 'stem cell therapies' offered at clinics and hospitals in a growing number of countries, saying they were highly risky," the story begins.
Yamanaka shared the prize with Sir John B. Gurdon for showing that mature cells can be reprogrammed to become "pluripotent"–capable of developing into other cell types. In his story for Inside Science, Joel N. Shurkin notes high up that Gurdon did his prize-winning work 50 years ago–in 1962. That was a surprise; who knew about stem cells 50 years ago?
Turns out, Gurdon did. Shurkin writes that "for his doctoral thesis at Oxford, Gurdon took the nucleus of cells from the intestines of one frog and transplanted the genetic matter into the fertilized egg of another. The egg grew into a normal tadpole. Gurdon had cloned a frog."
It took co-winner Yamanaka quite a while to catch up; he did his prize-winning work a mere six years ago, Shurkin reports.
Gautam Naik at The Wall Street Journal reports that the pair got the Nobel for "cellular programming," missing the opportunity to get "stem cell" into the lede; a mistake, I think. Readers recognize the term "stem cells" even if not all are clear on what they are. "Cellular programming" sounds like a way to add features to your phone.
In the second graf, Naik says the researchers' success in turning mature cells into "an embryonic-like state" was "a head-spinning discovery that is the biological equivalent of turning back time." That's a head-spinning line, but I don't think it works. Reprogramming cells does not reverse time; it changes cells, endowing them with properties they didn't have before.
Karl Ritter at The AP describes the winners as "two scientists from different generations," a nice bit of intrigue in the lede. He also says that their achievement "reflects the mechanism behind cloning and offers an alternative to using embryonic stem cells." I'm not entirely sure the first is quite right–the mechanism behind cloning–but it's close, and I compliment Ritter for getting the significance of the discovery into a lede that contains a lot but reads well. And he does it without any time travel.
Simeon Bennett at Bloomberg goes right for the business angle, which is what we'd expect from a business-news outfit. In the lede, he curiously names only Yamanaka, saying that "stem cells won" him the prize and researchers are now using his technology "for an ever greater prize: restoring site." Wrong on several counts. Stem cells didn't win Yamanaka anything; Yamanaka's cleverness, insight, and hard work won him the prize. And nobody is using the technology to restore sight; Bennett reports that researchers "plan to use" stem cells in a clinical trial. Gurdon isn't named as co-winner until the fourth graf, a graf lower than "Pfizer Inc. (PFE)," which did not win a Nobel.
Anna Ringstrom at Reuters reports that the researchers won the prize for a discovery that "may one day regrow tissue in damaged brains, hearts, or other organs." That "one day" is a long way off, but I think readers get that. Eryn Brown and Jon Bardin at The Los Angeles Times say the research "upended fundamental beliefs about biology," and they quote a research colleague of Yamanaka's who says "it's nothing short of a revolution in how we think of a cell." Not bad.
Nicholas Wade at The New York Times misses getting "stem cells" in the lede, and is needlessly vague about what the winners did. They "helped lay the foundation for regenerative medicine," and "their discoveries concern the manipulation of living cells," he writes, before reporting what they actually did. He also gets quickly to an up-close-and-personal approach, writing in the third graf that "both men had to overcome false starts in life." Don't we love stories about kids who looked like failures and yet grew up to win the Nobel Prize?
May that happen to all children who make false starts.
-Paul Raeburn
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