A japanese scientist again (Katsuhiko Hayashi is in Osaka).

Shinya Yamanaka created iPSPs in 2009:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinya_Yamanaka

Guess the japanese excel at micromanaging. Although one could say that the research here in the article is more epic than Shinya's discovery, but I remember having watched one of his presentation and it convinced me of pure epicness, if you understand how his team found the "Yamanaka factors". That was by human (work) consistency. About as epic as Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard and her mutant screens, that also involved tons of micro-experiments.