The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human

by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Since Yamanaka’s discovery, for which he won the Nobel Prize in 2012, hundreds of labs have started working on iPS cells. The allure is this: you take your own cell—a skin fibroblast, or a cell from your blood—and you make it crawl backward in time and transform it into an iPS cell. And from that iPS cell, you can now make any cell you’d like—cartilage, neurons, T cells, pancreatic beta cells—and they’d still be your own. There would be no problem with histocompatibility. No immune suppression. No reason to worry about the guest turning immunologically against the host. And in principle, you could repeat the process infinitely—iPS into beta cell back to iPS cell into beta cell (to be fair, no one has tried this yet). The recursiveness, though, sets up yet another fantasy of a new human: one in whom every degenerated organ, or tissue, could be regenerated, and regenerated again, ad infinitum.