Word: celling
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...laying an egg and falling behind Brown, 16-0, in the first quarter. Accustomed to a more solid brand of football, I became slightly disenchanted with my college football prospects. Never one to leave sporting events early, I resorted to restlessly checking baseball scores on my cell phone and chatting with the people around...
...Robert Lanza, chief scientific officer at Advanced Cell Technology (ACT), reported today in the journal Cell that his team has created stem cells using human skin cells and four proteins. The innovation builds on the breakthrough discovery in 2006 by Shinya Yamanaka, who similarly coaxed human skin cells to revert to a pristine, embryonic state by introducing four key genes into the cells, piggybacked on viruses. However, some of those genes are known to cause cancer, which made Yamanaka's stem cells - known as induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells - unsuitable for human use. (See a graphic explaining...
Until now, no one has been able to create iPS cells without using viruses and genes. But Lanza and his team found a way around both: the researchers isolated the proteins made by the same genes Yamanaka used and "tagged" them with a message that allowed the proteins to slip easily into the cell. Yamanaka's method, on the other hand, relied on using viruses to ferry genes into the skin cell...
...Arnold Kriegstein, director of the Institute for Regeneration Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, is excited by the advance but notes that it is still relatively inefficient. "The ability to make cell lines from patients with any risk of genetic alteration is a significant step, but the efficiency of 0.001% of cells is low, and even that took two months to achieve," he says, referring to the fact that only a tiny percentage of skin cells in the study transformed into iPS cells over two months. "How readily or quickly this technology is applied, and whether the efficiency...
...findings may herald a practical solution to the problem of embryonic stem cells, the controversial cells that can be derived only from embryos (researchers currently use embryos that have been discarded during fertility treatments). President Obama recently lifted the long-standing ban on federal funding of human-embryonic-stem-cell research, but still, these stem cells are unlikely to prove useful as human treatments - for maladies like diabetes, Parkinson's or spinal-cord injuries - since they would not be tissue-matched to the individual patients who need them. The new method could allow scientists to create stem cells using...