[ExI] A breakthrough paper!

[John K Clark]

A very important Scientific paper was published today, more important than
cold fusion even it were true, and was not published in Spoon Bending Digest
but in Nature. Shinya Yamanaka reports that he has found a simple and cheap
way to turn adult mouse skin cells into mouse embryonic stem cells, and he
did it without having to fuse them with egg cells. He found that just 4
genes can reprogram an adult cell to become what it once was, a stem cell
ready to differentiate into anything.  Apparently when these 4 genes are
injected into an adult cell it rearranges the chromatin, a protein sheath
that covers the DNA part of chromosomes and determines what genes get
expressed and what do not, into the way it was when it was a stem cell. The
result is an adult cell that is indistinguishable from an embryonic stem
cell. It hasn't been done with human cells yet but I'll bet it won't be
long.

  John K Clark