Apologies for being so dormant on the blog lately. A last-minute, whirlwind trip to Nature’s offices in London last week had this way of disrupting my life just a bit. But I do still plan on following up on my previous post about blogosphere etiquette (or lack thereof!) with some more thoughts, especially considering how a few others have recently weighed in on this topic.

But in the meantime, back on the Boston beat for a bit here, I wanted to point you to a couple of news items that have come out recently from Harvard. It was less than a year ago that a few big papers came out reporting how adult cells could be reprogrammed to become pluripotent stem cells—able to differentiate into other cell types.

Harvard stem cell scientists, in papers in Science last week and Cell this week, say that they have used this technique for the first time to generate cells from patients suffering from a variety of diseases. A key goal in stem cell biology has been to generate disease-specific stem cells and use them to study how the diseases are triggered and unfold at the genetic level. Now scientists have shown they can do this through reprogramming. The Science paper describes the generation of motor neurons from induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells generated from a patient with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) (see this Nature News story). The Cell paper is about the creation of 20 disease-specific stem cell lines that will be deposited at a new core facility at MGH (see this Nature News story).

Harvard’s stem cell community is featured in this news feature I wrote about Harvard, which has just come out in Nature (another reason why I’ve been so quiet on the blogging front…writing a feature is a lot of work!).

Harvard stem cell biologists are key players in a large experiment underway at Harvard to see if it can change its research culture to become more collaborative, interdisciplinary and open. This is a big step, considering how Boston’s big university isn’t exactly famous for being collaborative, or even coordinated in the way it does science. But things could change, with a near complete turnover in leadership recently and all the new science leaders buying into this vision. It remains to be seen whether the rest of the faculty will follow along.