Engineers who figure out how to take the delicate results of lab experiments and make them robust enough to survive the onslaught of industry, have a long road to follow in order to get from breakthrough to application. Thus, the news last week that adult skin cells had been reprogrammed using a novel technique, to transform them into embryonic stem cells, was seen as only the beginning and not the end by biomedical engineer PeterZandstra and others like him.
