â??I thought, we canâ??t keep destroying embryos for our research. There must be another way.â?
After years of searching, and at times almost giving up in despair, Dr. Shinya Yamanaka may have found that alternative. Last month, his was one of two groups of researchers that independently announced they had successfully turned adult skin cells into the equivalent of human embryonic stem cells without using an actual embryo. The other group was led by James A. Thomson at the University of Wisconsin, one of the first scientists to isolate human embryonic stem cells.