“Anybody can do this procedure. It’s a very simple recipe,” … “A combination of three or four genes, and in a couple of weeks, you go from a skin cell to an embryonic stem cell. It’s remarkable.”

Quote of the day by Joe Cibelli (Michigan State University)

On the stands this week (in Cell and Science), two recent and independent papers demonstrating the capacity to induce pluripotency in human somatic cells present their results similar to those found in studies performed last year on mice by the same authors (Thomson et al, 2007; Yamanaka et al, 2007).

These papers were submitted at the end of October and within 20 days they were revised and now published. Ba-da-bing ba-da-boom!

I’ll certainly get back to these papers this week, but for now I recommend David Hamilton’s great piece over at VentureBeat Life Sciences.

Quick publishing for embryonic stem cell research (without embryos)