Targeting The Good Cell, Revisited

The Nobel Prize news today reminds us of this great 2007 series from Mark Johnson, about Shinya Yamanaka and the race to reset the cellular clock.

Targeting the Good Cell

James Thomson knew that to send a cell back to its past was no trivial matter. Like generations of biologists, the University of Wisconsin-Madison stem cell pioneer had been taught that development was a one-way street; it began with an embryo and finished with all the mature cells that make up the body.

Yet in the summer of 2007, Thomson and scientists around the globe were racing to do what once had been thought impossible: to reverse the natural process and return old cells to their embryonic origin. They sought the…