Scientists turn human skin cells directly into neurons, skipping iPS stage

From Stanford School of Medicine:

Human skin cells can be converted directly into functional neurons in a period of four to five weeks with the addition of just four proteins, according to a study by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine. The finding is significant because it bypasses the need to first create induced pluripotent stem cells, and may make it much easier to generate patient- or disease-specific neurons for study in a laboratory dish.

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Living to 100? What about reaching 1,000 years of age?

From The BBC:

“The medicines that I think are going to come along in the next 20 or 30 years are ones that not only slow down the ageing process and keep us from getting quite so sick, quite so young, but also reverse the ageing process,” he said.

“In other words, conduct periodic repair and maintenance at the molecular and cellular level, so that even if we have already accumulated some of the damaging effects of ageing we can be periodically fixed up – like any simple man-made machine.

“Once we get medicine like that, we should be in a very powerful position to keep people in a genuinely youthful state – not just looking young, but feeling young and functioning young – for as long as we like.”

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