An adult skin cell can be rewound into a blank embryonic-like cell

In 2006, Shinya Yamanaka found that inserting just four genes into an ordinary adult mouse cell could reprogram it back into a stem cell able to become almost any tissue in the body. It won him the Nobel Prize six years later and sidestepped the ethical fight over using human embryos.

— Kazutoshi Takahashi & Shinya Yamanaka, Induction of Pluripotent Stem Cells from Mouse Embryonic and Adult Fibroblast Cultures by Defined Factors — Cell, 2006

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