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 healing potential of embryonic stem cells – immortal in a lab dish, able to become any cell in the body – but without the controversial destruction of human embryos.

An entire field, regenerative medicine, had come of age based on the promise that stem cells might someday offer a basic tool to understand and repair damaged organs and tissue. If scientists could obtain them by reprogramming a patient's own cells, they would bypass two major obstacles: the ethical debate over the use of embryos and the risk that one body will reject transplanted cells from another.