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.
