Yamanaka invented cell time machine

Dr. Shinya Yamanaka invented a time machine.

In the simplest of terms, that’s how he and his colleagues sometimes describe their work. They take full-grown cells from humans and they regress them - they send them back in time, to their earliest, embryonic state - and then they coax them into the future, into totally new types of cells.

Last week, Yamanaka was awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for his work creating induced pluripotent stem (IPS) cells - cells that are genetically engineered into blank slates, allowing them to be transformed into any type of cell in the body.

His technique could allow scientists to explore human diseases like they never have before, or help doctors regenerate tissue lost to injury or illness. Using his technology, scientists can now take a skin cell and transform it into a heart cell that will actually beat in a lab dish.

"I was here, at Gladstone, the moment I learned we got human IPS cells," said Yamanaka last month, in an interview from his part-time office at San Francisco’s Gladstone Institutes. Yamanaka did most of the IPS cell work at his main lab in Japan.

"My colleague sent me the image, and it was, wow," Yamanaka said, offering a brief, modest smile. "We had beating human heart cells, made from IPS cells."

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Why stem-cell science thrives in Japan

It’s easy to take for granted the epic scale of what some scientists are attempting these days. When the news broke a couple of weeks ago that Japanese scientists had turned normal cells from a mouse into eggs, and then fertilized them and seen them develop into baby mice, I thought it was pretty cool.

But I wasn’t that surprised.

I knew that Katsuhiko Hayashi — one of the scientists involved — was doing fascinating research on stem cells at Kyoto University, and so this seemed a natural progression for his work to take.

Then I spoke to him and his boss. What they said reminded me that they are attempting to do something that, until recently, would have blown the mind of almost any scientist, philosopher or other kind of intellectual there’s ever been throughout the whole of human history.

Mitinori Saitou, who is head of Hayashi’s lab at the Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology in the Graduate School of Medicine, was highly ambitious from an early age, and became particularly focused when he was doing his PhD as a young man.

"I got interested in germ-cell biology and the regulation of the cell fates," he told me, "hoping that one day it may be possible to develop a methodology to control cellular fate at will."

To control fate: It’s like something out of a Greek myth.

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