Kazutoshi Takahashi

In 2006, a scientist in Kyoto turned adult mouse skin cells into something like an embryos again.

In his Nobel lecture, he recalled the result his student, Kazutoshi Takahashi, brought him.

In his words, I thought this might be some kind of mistake.

I asked Kazutoshi to repeat the experiment again and again.

But one is enough to prove the instructions for a whole animal were still in that cell.

Then, in 2006, Shinya Yamanaka narrowed 24 candidate genes to four that could rewind an adult cell.

That's the experiment his student kept repeating.

In 2012, it earned him the Nobel Prize.

I'm Janet Rossant, and I'm Editor-in-Chief of Stem Cell Reports, the open access journal of the International Society for Stem Cell Research.

In 2006, Kazutoshi Takahashi and Shinya Yamanaka at Kyoto University published their landmark paper showing that mouse skin cells could be reprogrammed to an embryonic-like state using just four transcription factors.

Over the past two decades, this discovery has taken the field of stem cell research in many new directions.

opening up new ways to study human development, understand an engineer's cell fate, model disease, and explore new stem cell-based approaches to medicine.