Word: celling
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Vindication came on June 7, when the rest of the scientific world caught up with Yamanaka. Two separate teams of stem-cell researchers affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University and the University of California, Los Angeles published papers essentially confirming and refining Yamanaka's findings, while his own team released a new study that improved on his original research. The collective work-which one cloning pioneer compared to turning lead into gold-raises the possibility that scientists might one day be able to reprogram a patient's own adult cells to transform into human embryonic stem cells...
...years, many stem-cell researchers sought to accomplish that through nuclear transfer-transplanting an adult cell's nucleus into an egg that had been emptied of its own genetic material. This process is expensive and difficult, and so far no one has been able to pull it off in humans. Yamanaka never tried. Starting with a tiny team in 1999 at the Nara Institute of Science and Technology-he moved to Kyoto in 2004-Yamanaka focused on finding the genes that could persuade an adult cell to regress on its own to an embryonic state, without the messy mechanics...
...maverick streak comes naturally to the driven Yamanaka. Many Japanese scientists, even the best ones, can seem detached and dreamy. Though he has only worked in academia, Yamanaka by contrast has the no-nonsense air of the hybrid researcher/entrepreneur, a type that plays a big role in American stem-cell science. "He used to be an orthopedic surgeon, so he has a good sense in connecting his research to a practical application," says Yoshiki Sasai, a stem-cell scientist at the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe. "He's like a venture [capitalist]. He couldn't do big-scale...
...expected those opportunities to come so soon. Trying to discover the right combination of genes that would reprogram adult cells was a scientific fishing expedition in a deep ocean. In early 2004 Yamanaka had worked up a list of 24 possible genes he thought were instrumental in cell programming, and was ready to begin testing them. There was no guarantee any of the 24 suspects were the right ones, and when Yamanaka offered the experiment to one of his students, the researcher turned him down. "We knew the chance that the correct answer was in those 24 factors was very...
...Yamanaka. Scientists had assumed that reprogramming would likely require a complex arrangement of far more genes. "We were very surprised," he says-and with the Hwang debacle on their minds, "we were very worried." Yamanaka had another researcher repeat Takahashi's work, and when they published in the journal Cell in August 2006, he took the unusual step of including every last bit of lab data in the supplementary section of his paper. Still, Yamanaka's results weren't fully accepted until his work was replicated by others-the gold standard of scientific proof...