
Skin cells 'turned into neurons' by US scientists - evo_9
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-13567321
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ihartley
the paper is here:
[http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vnfv/ncurrent/full/natu...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vnfv/ncurrent/full/nature10202.html)

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cygwin98
In the article, the author also used terms like "reprogramming". That sounds
very 'geeky' to me. It feels like this: we can imagine those scientists were
computer programmers, those skin cells are the instances of a certain SkinCell
class (presumably derivative class of a base class Cell), their goals were to
convert SkinCell instances into Neuron (another derivative class of Cell).
Previous approaches involve two steps by using casting: SkinCell -> Cell ->
Neuron. Those programmers are smarter, they managed to accomplish it in one
shot. What they did (not very clear in the article, so I'm guessing here) by
directly modifying type information of those instances. They must be using a
certain kind of dynamic language.

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mathgladiator
Does anyone know how this would benefit an M.S. patient? It seems like it
would be beneficial for recovery during an episode.

