In a quiet operating room on Kyoto University¡¯s medical campus, a team of researchers slipped a syringe of lab-grown neurons into the brain of a living person.
Leading the trial was Jun Takahashi, a neurosurgeon with the kind of demeanor you¡¯d expect from someone whose job involves rewiring minds. His team had spent five years coaxing adult skin cells back into an embryonic state, then training them to become the dopamine-producing neurons that Parkinson¡¯s disease steadily erodes. Now, those donor cells were inside seven patients. And they were working.
At a news conference in April, Takahashi was characteristically reserved. ¡°Confirming therapeutic efficacy is an important step,¡± he told reporters, ¡°but not the final goal.¡± He meant it clinically. But the sentence hung in the air like a koan.
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