Holy amazing transformed skin cells, Batman!

People have been working on stem cells for a bit of a while now, getting them to turn into this, that, and the other type of specialized cell.  Truly totipotent stem cells (cells that can turn into any kind of cell in the body) are generally harvested from fetuses/embryos or cord blood or something along those lines.  Because of moral concerns with the use of these sorts of cells, there's been a push to induce more mature (and thereby more differentiated) cells back to a multipotent state, so they can then be nudged into becoming new types of cells.  As one might imagine, this is neither an easy nor swift process.

In a newly published paper in Nature, a Stanford lab reports the thoroughly remarkable direct transformation of mouse skin cells into fully functioning neurons.  (I have yet to read the paper itself; linky link is to the Stanford Report page.)  Wow.  Just... wow.  This could be an extremely useful advance in stem cell research, folks. 

And with that, happy Friday!