Dr. Sergiu Pașcă

You can freeze them down, put them in a, you know, liquid nitrogen, bring them out anytime, and they'll start exactly where they left.

And then with the right guidance, they can become other cell types.

So only around, you know, 1998 was that when we could actually maintain some of the cells in a dish.

So somebody figured out a soup recipe.

of chemicals that you can add and these cells will survive.

Because up to that point, it was not possible.

So that triggered, of course, the promise of this field that now would be able to

take those cells and derive various organs, perhaps transplant them, replace organs.

Of course, that ended up being much more complicated.

And of course, there were all these ethical debates related to the source of those cells and what does it actually mean to use these embryonic stem cells.

And yet we've learned a lot about those cells in early days.

What are the properties of those cells?

And then almost 20 years ago,

Shinya Yamanaka was a scientist in Japan at the UCSF, came up with an absolutely brilliant idea.

You know, we were always thought that the development, the development of the human or of any, it's a one-way street.

Once you go down development, you never come back.

So once you start making, you know, a stem cell that is more restricted, and then at the end you make, let's say, a liver cell, you can never go back and become that pluripotent stem cell again.

And that generally is thought to be useful to protect us from like cancer or like any others where we don't have, you know, parts of our hands like differentiating into something else.

And he thought that maybe you could do that, not in a natural way, in an artificial way.

And that, of course, would be very useful.