Nobel Prizes are awarded for past achievements, so it's only to be expected that the decade's most important scientist has never given an acceptance speech in Stockholm. You may not have heard of him, but Shinya Yamanaka's stem cell breakthrough changed the future of medicine.
Before Yamanaka discovered induced pluripotent stem cells in 2006, stem cell research was a political football. To get stem cells, you had to destroy human embryos and harvest their tissues; even optimists had to admit that that was never going to sit comfortably with the public. But human ingenuity, like an idealized Newtonian fluid, tends to flow around obstacles both political and moral. Yamanaka's discovery - that stem cells can be created from other kinds of cells - made the political war over stem cells largely irrelevant.
Thanks to Yamanaka's ingenuity, we may soon be able to cure a vast array of congenital and degenerative diseases - Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, spinal cord injury, stroke, burns, heart disease, diabetes, osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis...the list goes on. Stem cells could be to noninfectious conditions what antibiotics were to communicable disease - a "magic bullet" that vastly and permanently improves human health. Score another victory for humankind and for Science!
Runners-up: Grigori Perelman (Poincare Conjecture proof), Francis Collins (Human Genome Project leader)
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