You have to use human embryos to prepare human ES cells.  And some people do not like that idea, including the president of your country.  And also, because ES cells are not the patients’ own cells, we have to deal with immune rejections after transplantation.  So we decided to start a new project of our laboratory, in which we tried to generate ES-like stem cells, not from embryos, but from patients’ own cells. We thought the project would be very, very risky, challenging, and it would take 20 or 30 years.  But it turned out it took only five years to achieve that goal in a mouse.  So we were able to publish the generation of new stem cells — which were designated “iPS cells,” induced pluripotent stem cells  — from mouse skin cells in 2006. And last year we were able to translate that technology to the human.  So we and James Thomson, almost at the same time, were able to report that we can make ES-like stem cells without using embryos.  We can convert a patient’s skin cells directly to ES-like stem cells.