Towards Cellular Programming

Fight Aging!

Do you want to live a longer life in good health? Simple practices can make some difference, such as exercise or calorie restriction. But over the long haul all that really matters is progress in medicine: building new classes of therapy to repair and reverse the known root causes of aging. The sooner these treatments arrive, the more lives will be saved. Find out how to help »

A nice piece of news from Nature:

On 24 June, Kevin Eggan of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute told an international scientific meeting that his lab has fused a human embryonic stem cell to an adult skin cell. Eggan showed that the embryonic stem cell 'reprogrammed' the skin cell's nucleus, causing the skin cell to start behaving like a youthful, embryonic stem cell.

The fused cell can't be used for much - but it is a proof of principle for the future of tools that can change the state of cells. Our cells appear to be finite state machines on a level that scientists are beginning to be able to manipulate. Arrangements of genes and proteins determine how a cell behaves - whether it is a stem cell or a normal cell, for example. As biotechnology and medicine advances, scientists will be able to create stem cells - or any other type of cell required for regenerative therapies - as needed. This is a very worthwhile goal, the development of technologies to form a comprehensive biological repair kit capable of tackling a range of age-related disease and damage.