Coaxing a humble skin cell to become a jack-of-all-trades pluripotent stem cell is feat so remarkable it was honored earlier this month with the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Stem cell pioneer Shinya Yamanaka, MD, PhD, showed that using a virus to add just four genes to the skin cell allowed it to become pluripotent, or able to achieve many different developmental fates. But researchers and clinicians have been cautious about promoting potential therapeutic uses for these cells because the insertion of the genes could render the cells cancerous...
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