The Dawn of Regenerative Medicine

George Church is "thinking a lot about using regeneration as the key to treatments and keeping people healthy," as he tells David Ewing Duncan at Technology Review's Experimental Man. Induced pluripotent stem cells "is where I'm putting almost all of my chips these days, because it combines many of my interests — genomics, sequencing, epigenetics, synthetic biology, stem cells," Church adds. While much of the work so far has been done in rodents, he says that it'll be years, not decades, until it is tested in people. "The only way people are going to get this is through some brave soul," Church says. "It will start with a sick person, and they will end up getting well, possibly more well than before they got sick."