STAPs
The Acid Test: Turning Regular Cells Into Stem Cells
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
Caption: A new type of stem cells, called STAPs.
Credit: Haruko Obokata, RIKEN Ctr. for Dev. Biol., Kobe, Japan
Updated July 2, 2014: Since these two papers were published in the journal Nature, more than a dozen research teams have been unable to replicate the STAP findings. On April 1, RIKEN found the main author Haruko Obokata guilty of scientific misconduct. On July 2, Nature accepted requests from all co-authors to retract the papers and published an editorial discussing the retractions.
Taking a 30-minute soak in a bath of acid might not sound like a good thing. But it happens to be the latest—and the most shockingly simple—strategy for creating stem cells.
The powerful appeal of stem cells for science and medicine lies in the fact that they are both self-renewing and pluripotent, which means they can develop into almost any type of cell in the body. Stem cell technology offers an essentially limitless supply of specialized cells to researchers for exploring the fundamentals of biology, screening for new drugs, and developing new ways to regenerate damaged tissue and repair diseased organs.
