Sunday, Oct. 14, 2012

It's easy to take for granted the epic scale of what some scientists are attempting these days. When the news broke a couple of weeks ago that Japanese scientists had turned normal cells from a mouse into eggs, and then fertilized them and seen them develop into baby mice, I thought it was pretty cool.

But I wasn't that surprised.

I knew that Katsuhiko Hayashi one of the scientists involved was doing fascinating research on stem cells at Kyoto University, and so this seemed a natural progression for his work to take.

Then I spoke to him and his boss. What they said reminded me that they are attempting to do something that, until recently, would have blown the mind of almost any scientist, philosopher or other kind of intellectual there's ever been throughout the whole of human history.

Mitinori Saitou, who is head of Hayashi's lab at the Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology in the Graduate School of Medicine, was highly ambitious from an early age, and became particularly focused when he was doing his PhD as a young man.

"I got interested in germ-cell biology and the regulation of the cell fates," he told me, "hoping that one day it may be possible to develop a methodology to control cellular fate at will."

To control fate: It's like something out of a Greek myth.

Hayashi too has long been interested in pushing the boundaries of human reproduction. "When I was child, there was news about animal cloning," he told me. "That was one reason why I got interested in this field."

The atmosphere for research in Japan allows ambitions such as these to flourish.

More here:
Why stem-cell science thrives in Japan