By Sam Baker - 10/08/12 03:31 PM EDT
A pair of stem-cell scientists won the Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday.
The prize was awarded to British researcher John Gurdon and Japanese scientist Shinya Yamanaka, who pioneered stem-cell work that led to the advent of cloning.
They discovered new ways of creating stem cells that, as The Wall Street Journal put it, "significantly advanced the prospect of using a patient's own mature cells to create fresh tissue and treat disease."
The work began with Gurdon's experiments on frogs in the 1960s. According to the Journal, he successfully implanted part of a cell from a mature frog into a tadpole. That paved the way for Yamanaka to conduct similar research, but his didn't replace the nucleus of a cell.