British researcher John Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka of Japan won this year’s Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday for discovering that mature, specialized cells of the body can be reprogrammed into stem cells — a discovery that scientists hope to turn into new treatments.

Gurdon transferred DNA from a frog to a tadpole to clone the first animal.

Yamanaka used Gurdon’s concept to turn ordinary skin into powerful stem cells.

Gurdon, 79, of the U.K., and Yamanaka, 50, of Japan, will share the $1.2 million prize, the Nobel Assembly said today in Stockholm.

Scientists want to harness that reprogramming to create replacement tissues for treating diseases like Parkinson’s and for studying the roots of diseases in the laboratory.

The prize committee at Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute said the discovery has “revolutionized our understanding of how cells and organisms develop.”

Gurdon showed in 1962 that the DNA from specialized cells of frogs, like skin or intestinal cells, could be used to generate new tadpoles. That showed the DNA still had its ability to drive the formation of all cells of the body.

More than 40 years later, in 2006, Yamanaka showed that a surprisingly simple recipe could turn mature cells back into primitive cells, which in turn could be prodded into different kinds of mature cells.

Basically, the primitive cells were the equivalent of embryonic stem cells, which had been embroiled in controversy because to get human embryonic cells, human embryos had to be destroyed. Yamanaka’s method provided a way to get such primitive cells without destroying embryos.

“The discoveries of Gurdon and Yamanaka have shown that specialized cells can turn back the developmental clock under certain circumstances,” the committee said. “These discoveries have also provided new tools for scientists around the world and led to remarkable progress in many areas of medicine.”

Just last week, Japanese scientists reported using Yamanaka’s approach to turn skin cells from mice into eggs that produced baby mice.

Gurdon has served as a professor of cell biology at Cambridge University’s Magdalene College and is currently at the Gurdon Institute in Cambridge, which he founded. Yamanaka worked at the Gladstone Institute in San Francisco and Nara Institute of Science and Technology in Japan.

Last year’s Nobel prize went to Jules A. Hoffmann, Bruce A. Beutler and Ralph M. Steinman for research illuminating how the body’s immune system recognizes infection and marshals an attack against it. Steinman died three days before the award was announced, without knowing he’d won it.

Annual prizes for achievements in physics, chemistry, medicine, peace and literature were established in the will of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite, who died in 1896. The Nobel Foundation was established in 1900 and the prizes were first handed out the following year.

An economics prize was created almost seven decades later in memory of Nobel by the Swedish central bank. Only the peace prize is awarded outside Sweden, by the five-member Norwegian Nobel Committee in Oslo.

The Nobel Prize in Physics will be announced Tuesday followed by chemistry on Wednesday, literature on Thursday and the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday.

The economics prize, which was not among the original awards, but was established by the Swedish central bank in 1968, will be announced on Oct. 15. All prizes will be handed out on Dec. 10, the anniversary of prize founder Alfred Nobel’s death in 1896.

(The AP and Bloomberg contributed to this report.)