By Mark Johnson of the Journal Sentinel
Posted: Jan. 27, 2010
In a feat of biological alchemy, scientists at Stanford have turned the skin cells of a mouse into brain cells without ever taking the cells back to the embryonic state, raising hopes that medicine may be approaching a new era.
The work by scientists at Stanford University was described in a paper published online Wednesday in the journal Nature and builds on the 2007 discovery that human skin cells could be reprogrammed back to the embryonic state. The reprogramming of human cells was first accomplished by the labs of James Thomson at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Shinya Yamanaka at Kyoto University in Japan.
"To me, this is huge progress for biomedical science," said Su-Chun Zhang, a UW stem cell researcher and professor of anatomy and neurology.
