I have a poll running regarding who would have been the best choice to share the Nobel Prize with Shinya Yamanaka and John Gurdon, and so far the winner is Ian Wilmut, who cloned the first mammal, Dolly the sheep.
I should have included another option to indicate the possible preference that NO ONE should have been given the honor along with Yamanaka and Gurdon.
In other words, the option that the Nobel committee got it right by only giving it to two people instead of three as it could have done.
In the comments another suggestion was for Irv Weissman of Stanford.
Interestingly, folks have privately contacted me to tell me separately why each individual in my poll should not have been picked so there are a lot of strong feelings out there.
Update: notably the Nobel Prizes for CRISPR gene editing only had two recipients as well, Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna. This leaves open the question why not fill that 3rd slot for CRISPR too?
The reason that Wilmut did not get the Prize is that he attributed the credit 66% of the credit to somebody else.
First reported here:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1512377/I-didnt-clone-Dolly-the-sheep-says-prof.html
also here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/12/science/keith-campbell-cloner-of-dolly-the-sheep-dies-at-58.html?_r=0
What about Hans Scholer, who discovered most important reprogramming factor used by yamanaka, Oct4
I have always been curious why only the PI is honored but not the students or postdocs who helped to do the project. I recall former interviews with Yamanaka and him praising the first author (Takahashi K) of that paper that was released.
This is an excellent question. I don’t know why the Nobel folks are biased in that manner.