Fickle and flexible

Pursuing your dream career can be a rather depressing experience. As you progress through school, you increasingly narrow the number of subjects you study, shutting doors to other paths even as you follow your long-held ambitions. Oddly enough, this is something you have in common with the cells in your body. As you developed from an embryo, they made a series of decisions to follow a particular developmental path to become, say, a nerve cell or a liver cell. And once they had specialised into their final cell type, there was no going back.

September 2007

Stem cells keep their options open

Claire Ainsworth reports