Health & Science: Turning skin cells into a mouse

It’s a breakthrough that could eventually end the controversy over the scientific use of embryos: Chinese scientists have reprogrammed skin cells from a mouse to act like stem cells, then grown those cells into entire, living mice. It’s not the first time scientists have been able to turn adult cells back into stem cells, which are like a biological “blank check” that can develop into any kind of tissue, including blood cells, liver cells, and nerve cells. But there have been doubts about how versatile these new cells—called induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells—actually are. The Chinese breakthrough suggests the sky’s the limit. “We have gone from science fiction to reality,” cell biologist Robert Lanza tells the Los Angeles Times.

The researchers inserted iPS cells into mouse placental tissue and induced it to grow into healthy mice, which were 95 percent identical to the mice from which the original skin cells were taken. The advance may offer a way for scientists to use a patient’s own tissue to create a replacement liver, kidney, or other organ—without the ethical concerns attending the use of fetal stem cells for biomedical research. Because it’s so similar to cloning, though, the new technique does raise other troubling issues. It hasn’t yet been tried in humans, but in theory, a rogue scientist could take one person’s skin cells and develop them into an almost genetically identical human offspring. “All the pieces are here for serious abuse,” Lanza says.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up