Dr. Sergiu Pașcă

So what he did is he went and he looked at the genes that are expressed in pluripotent stem cells at very, very high levels.

So very, very high levels.

And almost as gene therapy, because we were talking about gene therapy, he took like the top couple of dozens of these genes and then started adding them.

inside skin cells.

So he took skin cells, initially from mice and then from human, and then started adding them one by one, two by two, three by three, four by four, five by five, six by six, to see whether any of those cells, once they have this combination of genes that are expressed in pluripotent stem cells, would somehow get confused

and think that they're actually a pluripotent stem cell, and then go back in time and actually become a pluripotent stem cells.

And he showed indeed that a combination of four is enough.

Of course, you can have six.

And that ended up being what we today call the Yamanaka factor.

In a way, it was almost like alchemy, right?

Where you sort of like, you know, transform something into something else, right?

You make out of this metal, you make gold.

It was pretty much like that.

It was kind of like the essence of alchemy.

And it turns out that that discovery was so profound because suddenly you could take a skin cell from anybody and put those genetic factors in

turn those cells into pluripotent stem cells that we'd later on learn they're almost identical to those embryonic stem cells, and now have those cells from any of us and use them for various purposes, perhaps for, let's say, making blood cells in the future, or perhaps to model something outside of the body.

And I was finishing my clinical training around that time.

And I remember even seeing that paper

And of course, in my naivete at that time, I thought, wow, this is it.

This is going to be, you know, the entry point for studying human neuroscience.