ABSTRACT
Towards the end of November 2007, just a few weeks after the announcement that the Nobel prize in Medicine for 2007 would go to three pioneers in stem cell research, two research groups reported independently that they had cracked a major problem on the path towards the holy grail of stem cell research, a method to reprogramme somatic cells into pluripotent stem cells. The two groups both turned human, adult (in distinction to foetal or embryonic) cells into what is known as induced Pluripotent Stem Cells (iPSC) (Takahashi et al. 2007; Yu et al. 2007).
