Two Kinds of Nobel-Worthy Discoveries: How iPS Cells Overturned What We Thought We Knew About Life

The other day, I watched a documentary about regenerative medicine using induced pluripotent stem cells, better known as iPS cells.

Researchers are working on creating corneal tissue and heart muscle cells in the laboratory and transplanting them into patients.

If the technology advances far enough, perhaps one day we will be able to create new organs and replace damaged ones.

One guest on the program, who was in their seventies or eighties, joked, “It probably won’t be ready in time for our generation.”

They are probably right.

But what about generations yet to be born?

If your heart fails, you replace it with a new one. If your kidneys stop working, you make new ones.

It would be like replacing parts in a car.

If that era really arrives, what will happen to the human lifespan?

Two Kinds of Nobel-Worthy Discoveries

A researcher once told me something interesting.

He said that Nobel-caliber research can be divided broadly into two types.

The first is a discovery reached through the accumulation of many years of research.

Building on theories and experimental results established by earlier researchers, scientists gradually push into unknown territory. This is the classic path of scientific research.

The second type is a discovery that overturns what everyone previously believed.

“That is impossible.”

It destroys the very assumption that led scientists to think so.

The work on iPS cells by Professor Shinya Yamanaka and his colleagues was exactly this second kind, I was told.

Turning Back the Clock in a Cell

The human body begins as a single fertilized egg.

Its cells divide and develop into skin, nerves, heart muscle, and many other specialized forms.

The process by which a cell acquires a particular role is called differentiation.

Once a cell had differentiated, it was generally thought that it could not return to its original versatile state.

At least, that was the accepted view for a long time.

Yamanaka and his colleagues, however, showed that introducing a specific set of genes into ordinary cells could return them to a state from which they could become many different types of cell.

In other words, they turned back the clock in the cell.

Earlier research had already suggested that a differentiated cell might be reset. The breakthrough of iPS cells was showing how specific factors could make it happen.

According to the old understanding, a skin cell was supposed to live and die as a skin cell.

Now that cell can be reset and then developed into heart muscle.

It is as if someone told a skin cell, “Starting today, you are on the heart team.”

In a human company, the employee would probably refuse that transfer.

What Will Humanity Laugh About in 100 Years?

Regenerative medicine is still developing.

There is an enormous technological gap between creating heart muscle cells for transplantation and creating and replacing an entire heart.

Even so, something once considered impossible is moving closer to real medical use.

What I find fascinating is that this is not simply the development of another drug.

Instead of treating disease with medicine, the idea is to rebuild the damaged tissue itself.

It could fundamentally change how we think about medicine.

Even if an age arrives in which organs can be freely replaced, that will not make humans immortal. The even more difficult problem of what to do about the aging brain will remain.

Apparently, no matter how far we advance, humans will always find the next difficult problem.

Still, people living 100 years from now may look back at our era and say this:

“People used to die when their hearts failed? That sounds terrifying.”

Seen that way, the medicine keeping us alive today may look remarkably primitive to people in the future.

However, the elderly guests’ joke at the beginning left me with one concern of my own.

Could that wonderful future perhaps be moved forward enough to arrive while I am still alive?

Now that scientists can turn back the clock in a cell, I wish they could do something about the clock on the development schedule too.