It's easy to take for granted the epic scale of what some scientists are attempting these days. When the news broke a couple of weeks ago that Japanese scientists had turned normal cells from a mouse into eggs, and then fertilized them and seen them develop into baby mice, I thought it was pretty cool.

But I wasn't that surprised.

I knew that Katsuhiko Hayashi — one of the scientists involved — was doing fascinating research on stem cells at Kyoto University, and so this seemed a natural progression for his work to take.