Shinya Yamanaka is a runner, a father and the man who first created stem cells from normal body cells. A pioneer of biomedical research, he describes how he was determined to find success in the face of all else.
Shinya Yamanaka began his career not as a scientist but as a surgeon, working at the Osaka National Hospital in Japan. It was a profession his father, Shozaburo, had encouraged him to pursue. Shozaburo, an engineer, had run his own business and was a great source of inspiration for the young Yamanaka. But when Yamanaka was 26 years old his father passed away from liver failure. Shozaburo had been suffering from Hepatitis C, which at the time had no known cause, or cure.
“His passing was very shocking to me. I felt powerless, useless. I became a doctor but I couldn’t help my own father,” says Yamanaka. “That was, I believe, one of the main reasons why I decided to change my career from surgeon to scientist.”
And so Yamanaka left his job as a surgeon and enrolled as a PhD student in the Osaka University Graduate School of Medicine. His vision: to help patients by developing cures for diseases as a scientist.
Like many young researchers Yamanaka’s first forays into research were not straightforward. His first project involved conducting a simple experiment to determine how a blood platelet activating factor affected the blood pressure of dogs. Instead of seeing an increase in pressure, as he had expected, Yamanaka’s measurements showed the completely opposite result.
“I got super excited by that unexpected result. That’s the moment when I thought I should become a scientist rather than a physician because I enjoyed that moment very much. I reported [it] to my mentor and to my delight he got very excited too.”
Buoyed by enthusiasm, Yamanaka uncovered the underlying mechanism, which became the topic of his first research paper and PhD. His result had inadvertently presented him with a chance to discover something unique.
“As a scientist we don’t want to repeat what other people are doing, we want to be as unique as possible. But in reality thinking something very unique is getting more and more difficult,” he says. “Now I can see any failure as a chance. That result will teach you something else, something new.”
There are different routes to creating a unique piece of scientific research, adds Yamanaka. The first, like Einstein, is simply to be a genius. “But I cannot do that,” he laughs. The second is to stumble across an unexpected result, as he had just done.
There is also a third strategy, says Yamanaka: “Try to do something very important but very difficult.” In other words, take a risk. This was the approach that would lead to the Nobel Prize.
By 1999 Yamanaka was head of his own lab, at the Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST). His research interests had moved onto embryonic stem (ES) cells, in which he saw much promise for curing the diseases that he so wanted to defeat.
Nobel Prize: https://bit.ly/3xhl2y3
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