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Nature Medicine 6, 1212 - 1213 (2000)
doi:10.1038/81303

Stem cell alchemy

Stuart H. Orkin1

  1. Division of Pediatric Hematology-Oncology Children's Hospital and Dana Farber Cancer Institute Harvard Medical School Howard Hughes Medical Institute Boston, MA 02115 e-mail: orkin@rascal.med.harvard.edu

The extraordinary plasticity of tissue stem cells, such as the ability of blood stem cells to differentiate into liver, would intrigue even the ancient alchemists. Recent discoveries also force us to rethink cell lineage relationships and expand the potential for cell-based therapies (pages 1229–1234).

CLASSIC EXPERIMENTS IN the 1950s demonstrating that introducing the nuclei of specialized cells into oocytes could redirect cell fate provided stunning support for extraordinary reversibility of the differentiated state1, 2. The birth in 1997 of Dolly, the celebrated sheep derived from mammary gland cells of a Finn Dorset ewe, affirmed this principle3 and established the field of animal cloning.