Another interesting process was in 2007. For various reasons, we decided as a family to go to Harvard on sabbatical. I was invited to go to the Radcliffe Institute, which is an institute that was formally for women.

My children were, we have three children. One of them was just about to go to secondary school, so he was extractable. My eldest daughter had not got into medical school, so she was sort of completely, my life is over, I'm ruined. She was 17, I think. And the middle daughter was in the middle of secondary school and was in for a change. And my husband could take unpaid leave, so we went. And it was 2007, and what happened is Shinya Yamanaka publishes the first human IPS cells and that was a very interesting time there because Harvard's Stem Cell Institute had been set up by let's say the lords of Harvard, the top professors, as a way of getting around US legislation, which said they could only use the stem cell lines made before a certain date. So, Doug Melton had made 18 human embryonic stem cell lines that could be used in the Harvard Stem Cell Institute.

I was actually invited, or a guest of Doug Melton, Ken Chen and Kit Parker in Harvard. So, there's a big dilemma – what are we going to do? What basis does Harvard Stem Cell Institute have if there's this Japanese guy who has made IPS cells? Are we going to push on with human embryonic stem cells or are we going to embrace them? And that last was the decision. They collectively embraced them because they got to strong background in human embryonic stem cells. Within a couple of months, they had them up and running. George Daley published a paper with the first IPS lines from patients, no phenotypes, nothing written in the top journal. But he was very generous and when I asked could I take the constructs to make IPS cells back to the Netherlands, he said, yeah, fine, no problem. So that's what I did.

Dr. Christine Mummery is a professor of developmental biology at Leiden University and head of the Department of Anatomy and Embryology at the Leiden University Medical Center. Her work specializes in stem cell biology, cardiovascular development, and developmental biology.

In 1974, she received her Bachelor of Science degree in physics, electronics, and mathematics from the University of Nottingham, UK and in 1978 received her PhD in biophysics from the University of London, UK for her research at King’s College London. She received a post-doctoral fellowship at the Royal Society, UK from 1978 to 1980, and in 1981 continued her fellowship at the Hubrecht Institute working with carcinoma cells. In 1985, she was appointed to a tenured staff scientist working on developmental biology and differentiation.

In 2011, Dr. Mummery founded the iPSC&OoC Hotel facility in the Leiden University Medical Center. From 2009 to 20019, she was the head of the department of Anatomy and Embryology at Leiden University and guest professor at the University of Twente from 2015 to 2023. She was president of the ISSCR from 2020 to 2021 and is the founding editor of its journal, Stem Cell Reports.

Dr. Mummery has received several awards for her work in developmental biology, including the 2014 Hugo van de Poelgeest Prize for Animal Alternatives, the 2014 Hans Biomendaal Medal for innovative interdisciplinary research, being an elected member of the Academia Europaea in 2015 and Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2010, the 2021 Fondation Lefoulon Delalande-Institut de France prize for cardiovascular physiology, and the ISSCR Public Service Award in 2023.