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Shinya Yamanaka doesn’t see himself as a celebrity. But people do recognize the stem-cell researcher when he’s out for a run, often while training for a marathon, on the streets of Kyoto, Japan.
Many of them call out words of encouragement. Some tell him that they hope his research will lead to cures for family members who are battling severe illnesses. “I feel deeply humbled and grateful,” says Yamanaka, who splits his time between Kyoto University and the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco, California.
Some of the hoped-for cures could be nearing reality. It has been quite a wait — 20 years, in fact — since the paper1 that shook biomedical research and won Yamanaka a share of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. In it, he and his colleague, Kazutoshi Takahashi, also at Kyoto University, unveiled a way to turn back time in adult mouse cells, erasing their identity and reprogramming them to an embryonic-like state — all by switching on just four genes.
That discovery opened up a possible way to treat disease. If those...