“Embryonic” and “senescent” arenâ??t supposed to go together any more than “good” and “grief” or other oxymorons, which is why biologist Robert Lanza was “devastated” when he saw what was happening with the human stem cells he and colleagues were trying to grow. Like hundreds of other stem-cell scientists, they had been intrigued and energized by the 2007 discovery that adult cells can be regressed back to an embryonic state simply by inserting four genes into them. The discovery, by scientists at Kyoto University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, seemed to promise a way out of the bitter debates over embryonic-stem-cell research: rather than using human embryos as a source of stem cells, produce them from adult cells.
Office of Strategic Communication