Physiology or Medicine Nobel Prize Shared by British, Japanese Researchers

(Inside Science) -- Near midday in Europe, but very early here at Inside Science HQ, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to John B. Gurdon, 79, and Shinya Yamanaka, 50, “for the discovery that mature cells can be reprogrammed to become pluripotent.”

The Nobel Prize amount for 2012 is set at 8.0 million Swedish kronor (about $1.2 million), which the two are set to share.

Please check back to Inside Science all day long, as we’ll be posting updates to our news story and also updating this post.

Gurdon, or, Sir John B. Gurdon, of the Gurdon Institute at Cambridge in the U.K., has a long trail of media coverage and interviews. Here are some links that I found this morning. An interesting, hour-long interview with Gurdon is here . Alan Macfarlane is the interviewer. If you want to skip straight to the science, click here to go directly to where he starts talking about his research at roughly the 28:00 minute mark. Here’s another interview with him , this time Gurdon appears on a stage, with Harry Kreisler from the Institute of International Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

Gurdon has also been interviewed in several academic journals in articles that cover some scientific details (and still cover some personal items as well). Here are two examples: Sir John Gurdon: Godfather of Cloning from The Journal of Cell Biology and The Birth of Cloning from Disease Models and Mechanisms. And here is a good rundown of the history of cloning, in which Gurdon has played a big part, Nuclear Transfer: Bringing in the Clones , from The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Gurdon and Yamanaka appeared together (click here to watch their interview ) on the Charlie Rose show in 2009 when they were awarded the prestigious Lasker prize.

Here’s Yamanaka explaining induced pluripotent stem cells , and another video from Kyoto University describing them further.

Yamanaka is a professor at Japan’s Kyoto University and also a senior investigator at the Gladstone Institutes, which are part of the University of California, San Francisco. More information from UCSF is available here .

Here are two nice pieces featuring Yamanaka, an interview with Science Watch , and a profile from the New York Times .

Inside Science will provide additional Nobel Prize coverage, updates, and information, throughout the day in this post and also on our continually updated ISNS news story .

1:50 PM: Update

Here are several quick take reactions from scientists, including Gurdon, from the Telegraph .

Also -- check out this rundown from the University of Cambridge -- Gurdon is their 89th Nobel Prize winner.

Lastly -- for this update, a collection of tidbits from Reuters .

Enjoy!