Biography | Shinya Yamanaka — The Ikoma Graduate Campus Where the Factor Hunt Began

The Nobel Foundation's own facts page is blunt. He began the prize-winning research at the Nara Institute of Science and Technology. NAIST sits at 8916-5 Takayama-cho, Ikoma, in Kansai Science City. Yamanaka arrived in 1999 as an associate professor at the Center for Genetic Education and Research, after three lean years back at Osaka City University. He became a full professor on this campus in 2003. The question he set was small and rude: which genes, out of the many that mark an embryonic stem cell, can push a mature cell backward. Kazutoshi Takahashi joined the hunt here. The four factors that worked — Oct3/4, Sox2, Klf4, and c-Myc — were published from Kyoto University's Institute for Frontier Medical Sciences in Cell on 25 August 2006. By then Yamanaka had already moved to that Kyoto institute, in 2004. The first screening, and the first belief that four genes might be enough, started on this Ikoma campus. NAIST is a graduate-only national university founded in 1991. The gate and the labs are public research buildings. A visitor who pins only Kyoto skips the years when the list of candidate factors was still a list. Living-person rule: the campus and the publication years only. Photo: Helito, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: National Institutes of Health, public domain.