Celebrated adult stem cell researcher Shinya Yamanaka will
deliver a lecture, ‘New era of medicine with iPS cells', here
on Monday as part of a three-city lecture series. Prof.
Yamanaka's scientific breakthrough was the creation of
embryonic-like stem cells from adult skin cells.

The lecture by this Japanese physician is the third edition of
The Cell Press-TNQ India Distinguished Lectureship Series. He
will also deliver it in Chennai on February 1 and New Delhi on
February 3. The lecture series is co-sponsored by Cell Press
and TNQ Books and Journals.

Quantum leap

The stated goal of Prof. Yamanaka's laboratory has been to
generate pluripotent stem cells from human somatic cells. The
ability to re-programme adult cells back into an earlier,
undifferentiated state has helped to reshape the ethical debate
over stem cell research by providing an approach to obtain
pluripotent stem cells that need not be harvested from an
embryo.

Prof. Yamanaka, who was awarded the Albert Lasker Prize in 2009
and the Wolf Prize in 2011, is the director of the Centre for
iPS Cell Research and Application and professor at the
Institute for Frontier Medical Sciences at Kyoto University. He
is also a senior investigator at the UCSF-affiliated J. David
Gladstone Institutes and a professor of Anatomy at the
University of California in San Francisco.

Previous lectures

The inaugural speaker of the lecture series was American
biologist David Baltimore, who won the 1975 Nobel. The second
speaker was Australia-born American biological researcher
Elizabeth Blackburn, awarded the 2009 Nobel.

The lecture in Bangalore will commence at 4.30 p.m. at J.N.
Tata Auditorium, National Science Seminar Complex, Indian
Institute of Science, C.V. Raman Road.

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Lecture by stem cell researcher tomorrow