We can revert normal human bloodcells into stem cells and then into specialized cells like neurons. It was an incredible breakthrough several years ago that nobody seems to know. There’s been recent developments too
I only found out about it when I was talking to Hon (the lead on this project), and asked him where he got the neurons for playing pong, and he said “I got them from myself”.
Do you have a link for the paper that describes the process for converting blood into stem cells? Curious how they went about it because making red blood cells into stem cells would be hard since they have no nucleus and no DNA. I googled but couldn’t find anything about how they do it.
Fair warning, I was only taking Hon’s word for it in my original comment.
That said, the magic term that will get you a flood of journal articles is “induced pluripotent stem cells ( iPSCs)” and this article a good overview/context to the work.
I’ll edit my comment to include the link
Thanks, that looks legit, especially considering they got a Nobel for the process. Red blood cells wouldn’t work though, no genetic material to tell the cell what to do. Skin cells sure but deeper layers before they ditch their nucleus. The bottom layer of your epidermis is already made of stem cells that continuously produce new keratinocytes (skin cells). That’d make sense as a starting point for what they did. I’ve been in medicine for seven years and there have been all kinds of crazy claims made but researchers so I’m always skeptical.
