Nov. 20, 2017, marks the 10th anniversary of announcing the successful derivation of induced pluripotent stem cells from human somatic cells, published by SCRMC faculty member James Thomson, V.M.D., Ph.D., and his team in Science.
Thomson continues his many research collaborations on campus and beyond as Director of Regenerative Medicine at the Morgridge Institute for Research. He is also a professor in the Department of Cell and Regenerative Biology in the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health.
He is pictured here with Junying Yu, lead author on the Science paper and assistant scientist at the Genome Center of Wisconsin and the Wisconsin National Primate Research Center at the time. Yu went on to work at Cellular Dynamics International and is now chair of NuwaCell in China. (Photo by Bryce Richter, University Communications.) At right is a colony of iPS cells viewed under a microscope in the Thomson lab. Thomson first came to the UW-Madison by joining the Primate Center as a reproductive biologist in 1991 and becoming its head pathologist in Animal Services in 1996. He was the first in the world to successfully grow nonhuman primate embryonic stem cells and then human embryonic stem cells, in 1995 and 1998, respectively.