Good news that the Nobel prize for Medicine etc has gone to two pioneers of stem cell research, John Gurdon from the UK and Shinya Yamanaka from Japan.
Wish I understood how skin cells (etc) could be 'reprogrammed'. I thought specialisation of cells was all to do with which genes are switched on or off - thousands of switches. I'm sure that's what Steve Jones said on In Our Time last month!
BTW I love the new background: light blue, very celestial.
My rather poor understanding of what John Gurdon did was to create a method by which any cells (skin for example) could be converted into Stem cells. I think this involved adding a bit of DNA (probably via a virus). From the stem cell - other people have developed methods for various types of cell differentiation. I don't know enough about these to comment sensibly.
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