Jacob Kimmel

You make an itemized list of the possible risks you might run into.

Here are the ways it might be toxic.

Here are the ways it might cause cancer.

Are we able to measure deterministically and empirically that that doesn't actually occur?

You're entirely right.

You know, Shinya Amanaka was able to do this with a relatively small team with relatively few resources and achieve this remarkable feat.

So it's entirely worth asking, why can't a similar procedure work for arbitrary problems in reprogramming cell state, whether it be trying to make an age cell act like a young one, disease cell act like a healthy one?

Why can't you just take 24 transcription factors and randomly sort through them?

So there were two features of Xinyue's problem that I think make it amenable to that sort of interrogation that aren't present for many other types of problems.

And this is why he's such a remarkable scientist.

Most of science is problem selection.

You don't actually get better at pipetting or running experiments after a certain age, but you do get better at picking what to do.

And he's amazing at this.

So the first feature is that measuring your success criterion is trivial in the particular case he was investigating.

He's starting with somatic cells that, in this case, were a type of fibroblast, which literally is defined as cells that stick to glass and grow in a dish when you grind up a tissue.

So it sounds fancy, but it's a very simplistic thing.

So he's starting with fibroblasts.

You can look at them under a microscope, and you can see their fibroblasts just based on how they look.

And then the cells he's reprogramming toward are embryonic stem cells.

So these are tiny cells.