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Stem-cell Pioneer in Japan Struggles to Deal With Success
"I was a surgeon, but I found myself not good at surgery," said the Japanese professor, describing why he changed his career from medicine to stem cell research.
Yamanaka has been incredibly successful in his second career and was this week awarded a share of the Shaw Prize, a million-dollar science award set up by Hong Kong philanthropist and film mogul Run Run Shaw.
The award recognised Yamanaka's moment of genius, when he discovered how to turn skin cells into stem cells, the so-called master cells which can develop into any of hundreds of different cell types in the body, replacing those lost or damaged by disease.
Stem cell therapy has been touted as a promising intervention for neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's or Alzheimer's, as well as helping create new drugs and improving research.
Although his technique is a long way from being perfected, it has created a potential alternative to stem cells harvested from embryos, a procedure that has provoked the ire of pro-life and religious groups across the world.
The new technique is so promising that one of the men who created the world's first cloned sheep, Dolly, and who shared the Shaw Prize with Yamanaka, has stopped cloning embryos to focus on studying stem cells derived from skin cells.
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