Word: celling
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Twenty-five days. That's how long it took Dr. Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University to undo more than 30 years of exquisitely programmed biology packed into a woman's cheek cell - and just maybe change the world. In a procedure that some scientists thought could take decades to discover, Yamanaka tricked the cheek cell into acting like an embryonic stem cell - capable of dividing, developing and maturing into any of the body's more than 200 different cell types. And he wasn't alone: on the same day that he published his milestone in the journal Cell, James Thomson...
...RING Technophiles turned the retort into a ringtone. More than half a million people have downloaded it, generating more than $2 million in profits. While the tone struck a chord with Spanish cell-phone users, Venezuelans are also getting involved--some students are downloading the ringtone as a form of protest against Ch?...
...That's why nearly every major stem cell lab began looking for an alternative approach, the most promising of which was to simply reprogram adult cells without eggs or embryos. "When I started this work, I thought it would be a 20-year, not a few-year problem," says Thomson. But sometimes science can be surprising, and in this case, all it took to accomplish a complex biological time warp was a handful of genes that suppress cells from dividing and maturing...
...Finally, the promise and potential of directly reprogrammed cells calls into question whether embryonic stem cells are useful any more. Why go to the trouble of creating embryos when stem cells can be coaxed directly from properly manipulated cells? At least for the time being, says Dr. Douglas Melton, co-director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute, embryonic stem cell research should continue, since it's not clear yet how robust and safe stem cell therapies from other methods might be. "My answer to that question comes from a different perspective," he says. "Not from a scientific or political...
...Neither Yamanaka nor Thomson believes their cells are quite ready for patients yet; for one, both methods use viruses to deliver the time-reversing genes, a practice that is acceptable in the lab but unsafe for the clinic. But the advances are finally pushing stem cell researchers to start talking about when, not if, stem-cell based therapies will be developed to treat diseases...