Lifestyle Spotlight

The Year of Sheltering Dangerously By Ben Fong-Torres

Posted by Ben Fong-Torres - on Wednesday, 31 March 2021

The Year of Sheltering Dangerously By Ben Fong-Torres Well, hasn’t THIS been a fun 365? As we approached the anniversary of the shelter-in-place orders for the San Francisco Bay Area, on March 16, I thought of some of the changes we’ve been through. In February, our calendar was packed with restaurant dinners and a large, loud gathering at Harbor Villa, saluting our friend, the civil rights attorney Dale Minami. And there was my 24th time as co-anchor of the...

SF Scientist Shinya Yamanaka shares Nobel medicine prize

Posted by AC Team on Monday, 08 October 2012.

October 8, 2012

DR-SHINYA-YAMANAKA-Photo-by-Chris-Goodfellow-Gladstone-Institutes-SF Dr. Shinya Yamanaka - Photo by Chris Goodfellow Gladstone Institutes SF

The world of medicine has taken a huge leap forward with the startling discoveries by Dr. Shinya Yamanaka, 50, and British researcher Sir John Gurdon, 79.

Yamanaka and Gurdon are winners of the Nobel Prize for medicine announced today for their joint discoveries in stem cells.

As a post-doctorate scientist at Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco, Yamanaka began what would become his life's work to unlock the code to creating stem cells.

By 2006, he succeeded in unlocking the code, furthering the research published in 1962 by Sir John Gurdon, who now works for the University of Cambridge.

The groundbreaking discoveries prove that it is possible to take genetic material from any cell in the body, such as skin cells, and tranplant and reprogram them into a stem cell to become any other cells in the body.

Dr. Yamanaka, currently a professor at Kyoto University in Kyoto, Japan still works and commutes monthly to San Francisco for Gladstone, which is affiliated with the health-sciences institution University of California, San Francisco (UCSF).