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Reversing Cellular Age: The Scientist Who Helped Create iPS Cells Reveals What’s Next

For most of human history, scientists believed that once a cell became a skin cell, a neuron, or a heart cell, that identity was permanent. Then a group of researchers discovered something extraordinary: cells could be reset. My guest today was there when that discovery happened.

Dr. Koji Tanabe, Ph.D. is Founder and CEO of I Peace (https://ipeace.com/en/), one of the world’s leading companies advancing induced pluripotent stem cell — or iPSC — technology from the research laboratory into scalable clinical manufacturing.

Dr. Tanabe occupies a truly unique place in modern biomedical history. He earned his Ph.D. in the laboratory of Nobel Laureate Dr. Shinya Yamanaka at Kyoto University and was the second author on the landmark scientific paper that first demonstrated the successful creation of human induced pluripotent stem cells — a discovery that fundamentally changed regenerative medicine and ultimately earned Dr. Yamanaka the 2012 Nobel Prize.

After helping establish one of the most important technologies in modern biology, Dr. Tanabe continued his work at Stanford University in the laboratory of Dr. Marius Wernig, a pioneer of direct cellular reprogramming, where he investigated how mature blood cells can be directly converted into neurons and explored the molecular mechanisms that govern cellular identity.

In 2015, Dr. Tanabe founded I Peace with an ambitious vision: to make clinical-grade iPS cells accessible at industrial scale. Today, the company has developed automated GMP manufacturing platforms capable of producing personalized and clinical-grade iPS cells for researchers, pharmaceutical companies, and regenerative medicine programs around the world.

On the episode we’ll explore how far the field has come since those first groundbreaking experiments nearly two decades ago, where regenerative medicine stands today, the growing role of iPS cells in drug discovery and transplantation, the excitement surrounding in vivo reprogramming and partial cellular rejuvenation, and what may ultimately become possible when every individual has access to their own personalized stem cell bank.

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Mega-study analyzes the impact of gratitude interventions

Are some interventions designed to induce gratitude more effectively than others? In which countries and cultures do they work best to improve mood, strengthen bonds between people and promote social reciprocity? A study aimed at answering these questions—conducted in 34 countries with more than 10,000 participants—had its results published in PNAS. In Brazil, the project received the help of researchers and 598 volunteers who responded to intervention prompts via an online tool.

“One of our main overall findings is that all the proposed interventions worked,” says Paulo Sérgio Boggio, a psychologist, professor at Mackenzie Presbyterian University and coordinator of the National Institute of Science and Technology in Social and Affective Neuroscience (INCT-Sani). Boggio and his former graduate student, Beatriz Bezerra de Souza, are the two Brazilian co-authors of the article.

Thirty-six researchers are listed as authors of the paper, including experimental psychologist Michael McCullough, a professor at the University of California, San Diego. The study was coordinated by Nicholas Coles, a researcher at the University of Florida.

User awareness in frontier models

Despite no longer “thinking out loud” about who the user is, the underlying behavioral shifts remained just as strong. This means user-aware adaptations are becoming increasingly covert and difficult to detect simply by monitoring an AI’s internal reasoning logs.

Our results suggest that user awareness is a meaningful and understudied form of situational awareness in frontier language models. The effect is significant and robust, hard to detect, and can persist even without reasoning. To be clear, these effects say nothing about the individuals named: we find no evidence that any of them sought this differential treatment, and the behavior almost certainly emerged as an unintended artifact of training rather than by anyone’s design.

The most immediate implication of our findings is for alignment evaluations. Models can already recognize particular people and organizations and behave differently for them, so results built on synthetic names and companies may not transfer to deployments involving real, high-stakes identities. The behaviors we observe today are relatively benign, but they may be precursors of more concerning conditional behaviors.

An important limitation of this work is that we are mostly only measuring fixed-prompt propensities here rather than actual performance in critical tasks. We hope to broaden and automate the investigation to a larger degree with our ongoing efforts.

Digit regeneration in mice is stimulated by sequential treatment with FGF2 and BMP2

Basically whole body regeneration is definitely possible we just need to right genetic code to push the regeneration button in the human body much like how these mice had their digits regenerated so too we can regenerate just like Deadpool or even the axolotl.

Wound fibrosis after amputation in mammals is replaced with regeneration of amputated structural elements by sequential FGF2/BMP2 treatment. Regenerated tissues include phalangeal/sesamoid bones, tendon/ligament, synovial joint, articular cartilage.

From fragment to form: wholebody regeneration in a model urochordate Medicine

Whole body regeneration is possible just would need to find it in human beings similar genetics.

Rinkevich, Y., Rinkevich, B. From fragment to form: whole-body regeneration in a model urochordate. npj Regen Med 10, 36 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41536-025-00423-0

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LLMs show language does not describe reality

We tend to think of language, perception and thought as representing the world, pointing towards and mapping reality. But AI’s large language models suggest that this isn’t how language works, argues cognitive scientist Elan Barenholtz. These models prove that language and imagery can produce coherent continuations without ever grounding themselves in external reality. This “autogenerative” capacity was always present in language, awaiting discovery. And, Barenholtz argues, it is now the best explanation we have of how language and perception work in humans. Meaning arises not by establishing facts about the world, but rather through language’s generative role in producing further language, imagery, and, ultimately, coordinated human action.

Imagine that archaeologists unearth clay tablets from an ancient civilization, long lost to the world. There are no bilingual texts, no known descendants of the civilization, nothing to anchor a translation of the tablets. They seem to display nothing more than rows of arbitrary squiggles. Now imagine that someone claims to have decoded the squiggles. “These patterns,” they assure us, “are self-predicting. The sequence of symbols in one part of the tablet is mathematically sufficient to derive what will appear in another part.” And, indeed, they produce an algorithm which correctly predicts the text on the right side of each tablet based on the text on the left side.

The finding that the symbols contain this predictive structure would be an extraordinary insight. But we still might ask, “what do the symbols mean?” Now replace the tablets with the digital corpus we call the internet, and the algorithm with a large language model. The civilization is ours. And the question of meaning is ours too.

Magnitude and Determinants of Placebo Response in Acute Migraine TrialsA Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Background and ObjectivesMigraine is a highly prevalent and disabling neurologic disorder. Beyond drug-specific mechanisms, the role of contextual, individual-related, and disease-related factors remains poorly characterized. We quantified placebo…

Early Cochlear Implant Promotes Global Development in Children with SeveretoProfound Hearing Loss

Background/Objectives: The primary objective of the present study was to investigate early global development in children after one year of cochlear implant (CI) use. The secondary objective was to investigate the role of variables such as age at CI activation, gender, and parental schooling in early global development in children with a CI. Methods: The study sample included 24 subjects. All children were affected by severe-to-profound congenital bilateral sensorineural hearing loss (HL). The HL was diagnosed between 1 and 23 months of age (median 3 months) and participants underwent cochlear implant activation at 9–25 months (median 14 months). Participants were evaluated before CI surgery and after one year of CI use using the Italian version of the Griffiths III scales.

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