From the “Good News” file: a Nobel Prize for two scientists who created stem cells out of adult cells!
Scientists from Britain and Japan shared a Nobel Prize on Monday for the discovery that adult cells can be transformed back into embryo-like stem cells that may one day regrow tissue in damaged brains, hearts or other organs.
John Gurdon, 79, of the Gurdon Institute in Cambridge, Britain and Shinya Yamanaka, 50, of Kyoto University in Japan, discovered ways to create tissue that would act like embryonic cells, without the need to harvest embryos.
The story seems to indicate that they haven’t done this with actual human cells yet, but work is ongoing on several fronts. So. Good.
We still have all these frozen embryos lying around, of course, which we shouldn’t forget. I’m thinking unstoppable force of personal minions, but you just know some rouge supercomputer’s gonna gain control of them and create a cyborg army before I can put the necessary funding/expertise together.
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