This is big.
Through a series of painstaking experiments involving mice, the Harvard biologists pinpointed three crucial molecular switches that, when flipped, completely convert a common cell in the pancreas into the more precious insulin-producing ones that diabetics need to survive.
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“One day, this may allow the doctor to replace the scalpel with a sort of genetic surgery,” Lanza said. “If this can be perfected, it would represent one of the Holy Grails of medicine.”
Yuval Levin says
Now mice aren’t men, and the application of this method to human diabetics and patients with other diseases is by no means on the immediate horizon; it may of course never materialize, as diabetic mice have been cured before. You can never be sure, and especially not after just one experiment. But whatever the eventual clinical applications, the implications of the work for cell biology are extraordinary—that sound you hear is PhD-level textbooks being thrown in the garbage all over the world.
What an age we live in. Look at some other (speculative, breezily-presented) things that just might be coming along.
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