Atlas of cells offers a milestone leap in understanding of the human body

Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. New research based on the findings, published in several papers Wednesday in Nature and its sister journals, represents a “leap in understanding of the human body,” according to the Human Cell Atlas consortium. “Cells are the basic unit of life, and when things go wrong, they go wrong with our cells first and foremost,” said Aviv Regev, founding cochair of the Human Cell Atlas and executive vice president for research and early development at Genentech, a biotechnology company based in South San Francisco, California. “This is just an incredibly exciting journey, in terms of our voyage through the human body and discovery of fundamental new insights into our cells,” said Sarah Teichmann, founding cochair of the Human Cell Atlas and a professor at the Cambridge Stem Cell Institute at the UK’s University of Cambridge. Jeremy Farrar, chief scientist at World Health Organization, who was not involved in the research, agreed that insights emerging from the atlas are “already reshaping our understanding of health and disease.” “This landmark collection of papers from the international Human Cell Atlas community underscores the tremendous progress toward mapping every single kind of human cell and how they change as we grow up and age,” Farrar said in a statement.