Freckles and Flab Make Better Stem Cells Than Skin
In a development sure to give Eric Cartman some conflicted feelings, a pair of studies have found that cells taken from freckles or fat cells produce stem cells faster, and with a higher success rate, than more commonly used skin cells. Currently, scientists create stem cells from regular skin tissue, in a lengthy and inefficient process. Only one in 10,000 skin cells succeeds in transforming into a pluripotent stem cell, and it takes a month for that transformation to occur. Both the fat cell and the freckle cell experiment improve on those numbers. The conversion of fat cells to stem cells, developed at the Stanford University School of Medicine and first reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, only takes two weeks, and produces 20 stem cells per 10,000 fat cells. The freckle technique, invented at Massachusetts General Hospital and first...