Your Inner Healer

For our reading assignment, we read about this article called Your Inner Healer. In this article, Konrad Hochedlinger introduced iPSCs, induced pluripotent stem cells to us. iPSCs is a novel type of biotechnology that was found by a group of Japanese scientists. Based on this article, a group of Japanese scientists discovered a formula (changing the original identities of the cells) to create iPSCs from adult cells with only 4 necessary genes and without eggs or embryos; moreover, they reverted the adult stem cells back to a more primitive form. By doing so, they found it is possible to use this technology to discover the healer of many diseases that people failed to cure before, such as type 1 diabetes, alzheimers, and Parkinson's disease. If this new biotechnology is practicable, then this discovery would lead us to new ways of therapy and benefit our health.

As this picture below shows, the cells can be reprogrammed through reprogramming factor genes and become iPSCs.