Abstract: The study of cell reprogramming has been carried out by many scientists for decades of years. The term cell reprogramming means “fully differentiated cells can be reprogrammed to multipotent stem cells”. In 1962, John Gurdon proved that somatic cells can be reprogrammed in an unfertilized enucleated Xenopus egg, demonstrating that nuclei from specialized cells still held the potential to be any cell type despite its specialization. [JP2]Based on Gurdon’s [JP]achievement, in 2006, Shinya Yamanaka made great progress in the cell reprogramming field. He successfully performed cell reprogramming outside the body and obtained cells with multipotency, namely induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells ), indicating that cell fate is determined by selectively opening or closing some certain genes. Compared with embryo stem cells (ES cells), iPS has great superiority in avoiding ethical troubles caused by collecting stem cells from human embryo. Moreover, the cells derived from patients’ own tissues are most likely to eliminate immune rejection problems in clinical application. The establishment of iPS technique has triggered the beginning of a brand new research field.

Key words: embryo stem cell, induced pluripotent stem cell, cell reprogramming, Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine