BBC News - Skin cells 'turned into neurons' by US scientists: Unlike other approaches, the process did not involve the reprogramming of the skin cells into stem cells, but rather the direct transformation of skin cells into neurons.
Marius Wernig, an assistant professor of pathology at Stanford University School of Medicine in California, was one of the researchers. 'We showed that it is possible to convert human skins cells directly into nerve cells which look and behave like nerve cells which usually only exist in the brain. It was known that it was possible to change a specialised cell back into a stem cell, what's called an induced pluripotent stem cell (iPS), but it was not known whether a specialised cell could be pushed into another direction, other than backwards.'
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