AND THE NOBEL PRIZE GOES TO...

Sir John B. Gurdon, born in 1933, won the Nobel in Physiology or Medicine jointly with Shinya Yamanaka. The duo's work revealed what scientists had thought impossible: the developmental clock could be turned back in mature cells, transforming them into immature cells with the ability to become any tissue in the body — pluripotent stem cells.

French physicist Serge Haroche and American physicist David Wineland shared the 2012 Nobel physics prize for their work on quantum optics. Haroche is a physicist at Collège de France and Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. He developed a technique to capture individual particles of light, called photons, by bouncing them back and forth between mirrors.

Robert Lefkowitz (left) and Brian Kobilka (right) have won the 2012 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on G-coupled-protein receptors.

Serge Haroche, of the Collège de France and Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, won the 2012 Nobel Prize in physics, with David J. Wineland.

David Wineland, based at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Colorado-Boulder, pioneered a method to probe charged atoms (ions) with laser photons. "David Wineland has achieved extraordinary control over the states of an ion," another Nobel committee member said.

Then in 2006, Shinya Yamanaka, born in 1962, took Gurdon's work a step further. While at Kyoto University, Yamanaka genetically reprogrammed mature skin cells in mice to become immature cells able to become any cell in the adult mice, which he named induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS). Scientists can now derive such induced pluripotent stem cells from adult nerve, heart and liver cells, allowing new ways to study diseases. Thanks to: LiveScience.com