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Comment by garmaine | Hacker News Reader

> Having a cell shift to a new form seems nuts.

It's quite common to take differentiated cells (e.g. skin cells) and turn them into stem cells, which in turn become all sorts of types of cells.

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I had a neighbor that was working on this to fix cartilage in race horses. They take connective tissue cells from the horse with bum knee, multiply them, turn them back into stem(ish) cells by exposing them to a series of chemical signals, purify them, and then inject them back into the injured area. They were stem(ish) cells because they would only ever turn into connective tissue, which was a guard against them turning into the wrong thing. He said full on stem cells had a tenancy to turn into cancers if used for this process. The purification process was the hard part, they had special plastic sheets that would stick to only the right kind of cells, they wash the cells over the sheet and then check with the microscope to make sure they only have good ones. Very tedious process, but a race horse is worth enough money to make it possible.

very interesting, until that last line

> Very tedious process, but a race horse is worth enough money to make it possible

only things "worth a lot of money" get the attention? This leads to many dystopian scenarios IMO

Like only very, very rich people having cell phones?

> only things "worth a lot of money" get the attention? This leads to many dystopian scenarios IMO

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonsil_Trouble

I’m not worth as much as a race horse, but is it possible to get this done on a human (maybe in another country)?

All my personal knowledge on this subject is like 6 years out of date. It appears there are companies now offering this for humans but I have no way of telling if they are legit.

https://www.stemcellctr.com/locations/denver-stem-cell/

To be clear though, This was a nuts concept until Yamanaka blew everyone's minds.

When I read cell biology texts in 2008 the "dogma" was that differentiation was a one way route.

I've had the pleasure of attending classes by a prominent stem cell person who presided over the conference session where Yamanaka presented his findings first. Apparently everyone just thought he was nuts. People only believed it when the original cell paper came out. Definitely one of my favorite biology papers of all time!

As of when?

As of 12 years ago:

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2007/11/researchers-turn-ski...

Probably at least a decade. I remember hearing about it towards the beginning of the century. It is one path towards a less controversial acquisition of stem cells.

"Common"? Like you can actually just transform differentiated cells into stems cells into other differentiated cells willy-nilly? I thought this was still being worked on.

Common doesn't need to mean every day, everywhere. Just that it is regularly performed in a number of places. It's all relative.

Just a general heads-up: the rest of the world hasn't quite noticed this yet, but it seems like biology has turned into a blink-and-you'll-miss-it science of rapid breakthroughs in the last decade.

I wish I could remember where I read it but..

'The 20th Century was the century of the computer, The 21st will be the century of the Cell'.

The premise was that you couldn't revolutionise biology without fast cheap computers.

I wonder if there is a Moore's law equivalent for biology.

Humans will now be able to optimise themselves for whatever they want.

We know how this ends.

There is a movie about it called "Sorry to bother you":

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5688932/

Yes. The number of bacteria will double every 20 minutes.

I mention this to people and they stare sort of blankly at me. I point out that computers started taking the process in the 70's with the advent of new ways to make them cheaply. But it wasn't until the 90's, 20 years later, that "regular" people started seeing a benefit in owning a computer and how many things they could do. Then over the next 20 years that changed nearly everything about our world and continues to this day although it is slowing down a bit.

Similarly with cell biology which now has enough tools in the toolchest to do amazing things, and every year there is a new technique, a new finding, a new way of putting together the tools.

I really think this will materially change everyone's quality of life when we've got much of the cell manipulation down to engineering rather than science. Organ replacement, cures for illnesses that are incurable, and generally better health for everyone. But its 40 years away at this point before its "common for everyone"

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