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Recent events have overtaken my considerations for Person of the Year. I think stem-cell pioneers James Thomson and Shinya Yamanaka are good nominees. I'm not a molecular biologist, but their discoveries with stem cells will have enormous scientific and political impact--which is very rare. Certainly, this discovery is as big and potentially even bigger than the cloning of Dolly, the sheep...
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...
...answer is a resounding yes, as evidenced by two groundbreaking papers published on Tuesday. In the journal Cell, Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University reports success in turning back the clock on cheek cells from a middle-aged woman, while James Thomson of University of Wisconsin, the first to isolate human embryonic stem cells, achieved the same feat with foreskin cells from a newborn baby. The achievements completely reset the boundaries of the stem cell debate, because both groups generated cells that looked and acted like embryonic stem cells, but without the need for eggs, embryos or ethical quandaries about where...
Everything about Shinya Yamanaka's discovery was right-except for the timing. The 44-year-old Kyoto University stem-cell researcher had found a way to genetically reprogram an ordinary mouse skin cell to revert to the virtual equivalent of its embryonic state, in which it has the potential to grow into any kind of tissue. The finding was a promising first step toward the creation of stem-cell lines for near-miraculous medical treatments-and because Yamanaka did not use human embryos, his technique offered researchers everywhere a way to sidestep the ethical controversies that have dogged the field...
...work, published in the journals Nature and Cell Stem Cell, represent true milestones, not only in the field of stem-cell research, but in the broader discipline of early biological development. Led by Shinya Yamanaka at Kyoto University, one group successfully coaxed a mouse skin cell to reverse its development and return to an embryonic stage at which it produced stem cells. Two other groups, based at Harvard Stem Cell Institute (HSCI) and the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at MIT, obtained similar results working independently. In the final paper, Kevin Eggan, also at HSCI, showed that even fertilized mouse...