It's a good time to be a stem cell researcher. Legal and political wrangling aside, the discoveries are starting to come thick and fast now and new breakthroughs seem constantly around the corner. Last November, I was writing about two groups of scientists who had managed to turn adult human cells into embryonic stem cells for the first time. Now, after less than a year, John Dimos and Kit Rodolfa from the Harvard Stem Cell Institute have given us two more surpassed milestones for the price of one.
As before, they have transformed adult skin cells have been into embryonic stem cells but this time, there are two important differences. Firstly, the cells that came not from a young, healthy individual, but from an 82-year old woman with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), the same condition that has paralysed Stephen Hawking. Even after a lifetime of chronic disease, the adult cells could still be reverted to a stem-like state.
