For you as a young scientist this is what I have to say:  Don’t take it too seriously,  view  the NP’s like Oscar–equivalents in science. Focus on what nature tells you is good science, not what humans tell you is good science.NP’s are highly political, and capricious, not only those that go to Obama and Krugman and Carter and Kissinger…. Noble prizes  reflect the collective mood and relative ignorance of mankind so  one shall not  overanalyze them in scientific terms. They are good for communicating once a year to the non-scientists on this planet what is going on in science.

 

But on the science in this case:  As you said, stunningly, both Gurdon and Yamanaka are not so much keen on understanding the underlying systems biology basis of reprogramming. Sir Gurdon, with whom I had the honor to discuss a few times when I gave talks in  Cambridge, is at the very least politely, and perhaps even intrinsically, interested in networks and attractors, had sharp provocative qualitative questions but I not am sure if he “gets it”. (e.g.: he believes in trinary and n-ary  branching processes which is of courses a mathematically very very unlikely singularity as opposed to binary branching, much as “trifurcation” is not a generic property of dynamical systems as opposed to bifurcation).  John Gurdon works (still!) on the mechanisms of erasing epigenetic memory in  the sense of chromatin modification.  But very admirable, fascinating person. He apologized for joining late in  the seminar I was giving because he was still pipetting! (at the age of 78!!).

Yamanaka  has been approached many times by Kuni Kaneko (strange attractor = cell type guy) and he told me that Yamanaka is neither interested nor has a clue about attractors. This is of course evident in his attempts to comment on the stochastic nature of reprogramming as we all know.

 

Also I think the postdoc should be acknowledged, and also Thomas Graf who was lonely for many years in his struggle for recognition of the idea that cells can be reprogrammed across lineages by TF overexpression (following Weintraub’s tradition). Postdocs need to be recognized because: The idea is simple – many a PI has suggested the same experiment of overexpressing Oct4, etc. to their postdocs (e.g. Ruedi Jaenisch has tried to convince his postdocs long before Yamanaka to do it but no one believed in it – they preferred the at that time less pedestrian looking, technically challenging nuclear transfer!). Thus, recognizing the importance of a project and doing it is actually the rate limiting factor in science – not having the idea!!  Sadly, in biology, ideas, theory and deep understanding are on the backseat.

So in summary, the lesson for you, is: unlike in physics and math, in biology the doers not the thinkers and those who understand rerum causas get the recognition. But the latter is much more fun!  (felix qui potuit cognoscere rerum causas)， 知因求果者得其乐）。