Ian Sample

speaker

2,123 appearances 29 recordings 3 series first heard Apr 2026 last heard 4d ago

Ian Sample’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 29 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 8.

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Science Weekly · Can a world-first gene therapy reverse ageing? · 16 Jul 2026 podcast

Because there's all that mess that's happened with aging. matched

And so this is a really interesting biological process that Yamanaka hit on. matched

And he found that these four proteins, these four Yamanaka factors, matched

are the ones that are triggered, that do that cleaning of the slate. matched

So if you put these factors into adult cells, this is what it does. matched

It clears away the epigenetics and those cells become what we call induced pluripotent stem cells. matched

And these are sort of stem cell-like cells which can grow into pretty much everything in your body. matched

And this was such a big finding that Yamanaka got the Nobel Prize for it. matched

Absolutely. matched

And what you can then do is you can steer that cell into becoming whatever cell you want. matched

Well, you've hit the nail on the head, actually. matched

And it turns out that these factors are extremely potent. matched

And when scientists like Yamanaka put them into mice, it turned out that they were so effective as to be dangerous. matched

What can happen is, as you kind of alluded to, is you can rewind the clock back so far, they actually become such blank slates that those cells can become all sorts of things, okay? matched

And if you don't matched

stopped short of going back that far, what we saw in animals was those cells can grow into something called teratoma cancers. matched

And these are tumours which contain an absolutely chaotic mass of cells. matched

You will have bits of tooth, bone, hair in those things, and they will be growing in these animals because you've just taken the cells back matched

to this blank slate level, and then they've just gone wild. matched

So that tells us you have to be extremely careful when you're doing this because not only can you induce these cancers, you need to know when to stop. matched

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