Rhonda Patrick· PhD
Well, first of all, no, there are plenty of ways now that have been perfected that induce pluripotency without actually using viruses at all. The most recent one that got a lot of attention a month or two ago was when Helen Blau's group at Stanford showed that they could do it with messenger RNA. But it's also been done just by electroporating proteins in. Of course, the problem here is that the actual efficiency is rather low in many cases. But that's improving.