Pluripotency from mature skin cells

This announcement gives me the greatest pleasure possible. It represents the ultimate death of embryonic stem cells, in terms of relative certainty. Here is what it is:

Chinese stem cell researchers have used mature skin cells to produce the “equivalent of embryonic stem cells”, from which they produced not just complete mice, but fertile mice which reproduced themselves.

The apparent pluripotency derived from skin cells arouses the possibility of cloning humans and “genetically manipulating embryos”. But this downside is not a necessary by-product of the method, and like all ethical issues it must be controlled by legislation.

The upside of this science is so great that it is hard to fathom. Where such techniques can lead seems to be science fiction come alive.

According to the Washington Post,

“In the studies, published in the journals Nature and Cell Stem Cell, the researchers used viruses to flip genetic switches in the DNA of skin cells from adult mice to turn them into iPS cells in the laboratory. The researchers then injected some of the iPS cells into very early embryos that are capable of forming a placenta but not of fully developing on their own. The resulting embryos were then transferred into the wombs of surrogate mice.

One team of scientists led by Qi Zhou of the Chinese Academy of Sciences created 37 iPS cell lines, three of which produced 27 live offspring, the first of which they named Tiny. One of the offspring, a 7-week-old male, went on to impregnate a female and produce young of its own. Altogether, the researchers bred at least 100 first-generation mice and hundreds of second-generation mice that were nearly identical genetically to the mice from which the iPS cells were derived.”