Profile of Shinya Yamanaka

摘要

More than a decade ago, Shinya Yamanaka gazed through a microscope at human embryos growing in a laboratory dish at a fertility clinic in Osaka, Japan. The pulsating blobs struck a primitive chord in the young researcher. "Watching the embryos, I felt that if there was a way to find cures for human diseases without destroying them, then that's what I should pursue," recalls Yamanaka, a stem cell biologist at Japan's Kyoto University and a newly elected foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences. That close