STEM-CELL TESTER

摘要

For an hour on Friday 12 September, Masayo Takahashi sat alone, calmly reflecting on the decade of research that had led up to this moment. An ophthalmologist at the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology (CDB) in Kobe, Japan, Takahashi was about to watch a sheet of epithelial cells that she had grown be transplanted into the back of a woman's damaged retina. She had made the cells from induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, which have been widely touted for their potential to generate genetically-matched tissue for treating a range of diseases. The transplant would be the first test of that promise in people, and therefore a major milestone for the stem-cell field. As she sat, Takahashi quietly considered all those who had helped her get to that point ("so many people - it would be like the credits rolling at the end of a movie"), and the scandal in the stem-cell field that had threatened to derail the project earlier in the year. "It was like a sacred hour," she says.