Nov. 20 (Bloomberg) -- Ordinary skin cells from the face of a 36-year-old woman and the foreskin of a newborn infant were turned into stem cells with the apparent power to become any cell in the body by two research teams working independently.

The two groups, one in Japan and the other in the U.S., each inserted four genes into the skin cells that switched on a process converting them into a form equivalent to embryonic stem cells. Those cells were then changed into heart, brain, muscle, fat and cartilage cells by one of the teams using a proven method for growing tissue from embryonic cells.

The technique could shift the ethics debate by ending use of human embryos and leapfrog ongoing studies by hundreds of small companies, including Geron Corp. and Advanced Cell Technology Inc. in the U.S. It could allow organs and tissues to be more easily created with one's own cells and, more immediately, give drugmakers a new way to test how new compounds interact with diseased cells, scientists said.

``It will revolutionize the way in which we study and treat human disease,'' said Ian Wilmut, the Scottish cell biologist who shocked the world when he cloned a sheep named Dolly more than 10 years ago, ushering in a new era of scientific exploration and ethical conflict. He predicted Yamanaka's work would earn him a Nobel Prize.

The new method was first perfected in mice by Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University last year. It may eliminate the push for so-called therapeutic cloning of human embryos as a way to create stem cells that genetically match a person, Wilmut said in a telephone interview yesterday.

Pursuit Ends

As a result, he said he'd no longer pursue that strategy in his work at the Scottish Center for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Edinburgh.

``We decided some weeks ago that we were not going to pursue'' human cloning, Wilmut said. ``It seems more likely that you'd get an effective or reliable source of stem cells from the Yamanaka procedure.''

The two breakthroughs were simultaneously released today in the journals Science and Cell. The research teams were led by Yamanaka and James Thomson, the University of Wisconsin biologist credited as the first to isolate stem cells from human embryos and keep them alive.

Last week, an announcement by Oregon researchers that they had cloned a monkey embryo and extracted stem cells from it had drawn fresh excitement within the scientific community. Now that accomplishment has been overtaken, scientists said.

The transformed skin cells, or ``induced pluripotent cells,'' as Yamaka calls them, showed they could turn into cardiac, brain, muscle, fat and cartilage cells, among other cell types, Yamanaka said. To get them to morph into cardiac cells, they followed a recently-published paper that described how to make them from embryonic stem cells.

`Beating Cardiac Cells'

``We just applied the same protocol to human pluripotent cells and it works,'' Yamanaka said. ``It's amazing. Those cells were skin cells only two to three weeks ago and now they are beating cardiac cells in a dish.'' One of the properties of cardiac cells is that they rhythmically, and visibly, contract.

Because his procedure is relatively simple to perform -- far easier than cloning -- it can be followed and replicated in thousands of labs around the world, Yamanaka said in a Nov. 16 telephone interview.

``You don't need any special equipment and we don't need any special techniques,'' he said. ``All we need is equipment for cell culture and for gene transfer. There may be 10,000 or more labs in the world that could make'' these cells.

While Thomson and Yamanaka each used four genes to reprogram the cells, only two were the same.

To contact the reporter on this story: Rob Waters in San Francisco at rwaters5@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: November 20, 2007 09:10 EST