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Asked by alexleemartin2001 to Dave, Matt, Tomasz on 21 Nov 2013.
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Matthew Tomlinson answered on 21 Nov 2013:
That’s a really tough question. For me it is the discovery of induced pluripotent stem cells which John Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for last year. This is where you take a normal cell that can’t become any other type of cell, like a skin cell, and add 4 chemicals too it. These chemicals have the effect of turning that cell back into a stem cell that can make any cell type in the body.
This work was pioneering and has so much potential, like finding out how diseases work or being used to cure diseases like heart failure by being turned into the cells that are needed to repair the damaged tissue. I think these cells will be used a lot in the future to regenerate damaged tissue, so I would say this is the best cell based discovery.
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David Christensen answered on 22 Nov 2013:
I agree with Matt about the importance of the discovery of iPS cells, but I’m going to go further back and give a different answer.
I think the most important discoveries might be those that came together to be called the germ theory of diseases. It had been thought that people got sick just because of some bad air, but several scientists started to show separately that disease was caused by microorganisms. Microorganisms like bacteria were first seen down a microscope by Anton van Leeuwenhoek in the 17th Century. In the early 19th Century, Agostino Bassi was the first person to prove that disease was caused by microorganisms. Other scientists including Ignaz Semmelweis, John Snow, Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch were able to see the same thing throughout the 19th Century and their work formed the basis of modern science in prevention of disease and infection. I think the discovery that disease is caused by cells has to be one of the most important discoveries about cells because it allows scientists to find ways to prevent disease.
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