Jacob Hanna, biologist: ‘If a human fetus model is controversial, I will make it without a heart or brain’
Biologist Jacob Hanna, 44, is one of the best scientists on the planet. In his laboratory at the Weizmann Institute of Science, in the Israeli city of Rehovot, his team takes skin cells from people and reprograms them in such a way that they are able to self-organize and form a structure very similar to a human embryo. Just a year ago, Hanna announced to the world that he had managed to recreate a 14-day-old embryo, but he won’t stop there. The researcher, born in a Palestinian Christian family in Rameh, wants to create a living structure that is as similar as possible to a human fetus, with little arms and legs, from which, according to his prediction, cells could be obtained for personalized transplants. If a person has leukemia, a fetus could be created from their own cells in order to create the organ needed.
Hanna recounted his scientific progress on May 10 at a conference in Madrid, at the National Cancer Research Center. Three days later, he answered questions from EL PAÍS in one of the temples of world medicine: the classroom in which Santiago Ramón y Cajal — the father of neuroscience — taught for three decades at the Illustrious Official College of Physicians of Madrid. Hanna is devastated by the “genocide” being committed by the Israeli army in Gaza following the Hamas terrorist attacks on October 7, but he still has the strength to joke. “Being a Palestinian in Israel, and also gay, my way of surviving is dark humor,” he explains.
