Word: thomson
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
...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, a pioneering University of Wisconsin molecular biologist, reported similar success in Science...
...year of remarkable research, in which scientists have surged ahead of ethicists and politicians in finding ever more clever ways to generate stem cells. But where other breakthroughs relied on using cells from living embryos - tiny bits of inchoate life, fraught with ethical issues - the work by Yamanaka and Thomson sidesteps that abyss by nursing adult cells into a state in which their cellular destiny is yet to be fulfilled. No embryos, no eggs, no hand-wringing over where the cells come from and whether it is ethical to make them in the first place...
...viruses used to ferry the genes that manipulate the cells can introduce genetic mutations and cancer. And with myriad ways to reprogram a cell, sorting out the best ones will take time - meaning that stem cells from embryos will remain useful (and controversial) for a while. Both Yamanaka and Thomson admit that we still know too little about how the process works to exploit the method's full potential. Nevertheless, their discovery has moved stem-cell research back to an embryonic state of its own - in which anything, it seems, is possible...
...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...