Biography | Shinya Yamanaka — CiRA, the Kyoto Institute That Turned Skin Back

People treat iPS cells as a prize photograph from Stockholm. The institute that still carries the work is here, on the Kyoto University Hospital campus at 53 Kawahara-cho, Shogoin, Sakyo-ku. Shinya Yamanaka showed in 2006, first in mice, that four transcription factors could reprogram an adult cell into a pluripotent state. The human paper followed in 2007. The Center for iPS Cell Research and Application, CiRA, opened on this hospital site in 2010 so the method would have a building, a bank of lines, and a clinical path that did not depend on one bench. Kyoto University's medical campus sits in the east of the city, below the Higashiyama hills. The institute is a working lab, not a reconstructed birthplace. Yamanaka shared the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with John Gurdon. The pin is CiRA, not a private address. Living-person rule: the public institute and the published years only.