It is a scientific milestone as great as the first flight, a medical breakthrough to rival antibiotics.
In simultaneous announcements yesterday scientists in Japan and America said they had discovered how to take an ordinary skin cell - and transform it into any other kind of human body cell
It means that in the not-very distant future doctors will take a scraping of your skin and grow you a new heart or liver. Or special insulin-producing cells to end the misery of diabetes.
Or develop any number of treatments for any number of life-threatening or debilitating conditions.
It means scientists are on the way to creating your very own body repair kit. And in the process it will eliminate the need for controversial embryo cloning.
The technique is simple in theory, complex in practice.
Cells extracted from your skin are stripped all the way back to of us." Like many great scientific discoveries the new "direct re-programming" technique has involved a race, this one between Professor Shinya Yamanaka, of Kyoto University and Professor James Thomson at the University of Wisconsin in America.
In the end they reached their stunning conclusions at the same time.
In Britain, Professor Azim Surani, Professor of Physiology and Reproduction, University of Cambridge, told The Mirror: "It's quite amazing when you think about it.
"We can take an adult body cell, their origins and then chemically "re-programmed" to develop into something else.
Its potential for treating diseases such as Parkinson's, which is caused by the loss of brain cells, is incalculable.
In theory it could also one day spell the end of transplant surgery as scientists would be able to regenerate damaged parts of the body without the need for donated organs.
Leading British stem cell researcher Professor Ian Wilmut of the University of Edinburgh, who created Dolly the sheep, has already announced that he is abandoning cloning in favour of the new technique.
"This is extremely exciting," he said. "We can now envisage a time when a simple approach can be take it all the way back and then turn it into any kind of body cell. It is quite incredible what we can now do.
"It is relatively easy to grow an entire plant from a small cutting, something that has seemed inconceivable in humans.
"Yet this study brings us tantalisingly close to using skin cells to grow many different types of human tissues.
"Normally when you grow skin cells in a dish, they just make skin cells.
"But they have re-programmed them into embryonic-like stem cells with the potential of turning into any different cell types." There is still a long way to go - only 10 cell clones were obtained from 50,000 skin cells. But in the Japanese laboratory clumps of skin cells treated to become heart cells started to pulse - just as heart cells cause the heart to beat.
"It is at a very early stage. But by using different genes we will hope to gain a good insight into how this magic takes place," Professor Surani said.
"What is clearly possible is that we can make cells from any individual with a simple skin biopsy.
"Or we can take cells from someone with a history of heart disease and study them to see how the heart cells are developing.
"Then we could develop targeted drugs to treat them." One of the most exciting aspects of the discovery is the simple fact that since the new cells or even new organ come from your own body there is very little likelihood of rejection.
Japan's Professor Yamanaka said: "We are still a long way from finding cures or therapies from stem cells and we don't know what processes will be effective.
"But we are finally in a position to make patient-specific stem cells for therapies without fear of immune rejection."
Professor Yamanaka shocked the scientific world last year by creating stem cells from mouse skin. Now he has used the same chemical cocktail with human skin.
Josephine Quantaville, of the Comment Group on Reproductive Ethics said: "This research makes absolute nonsense of any attempts to try to create hybrids by combining animal/human tissue.
"Embryo research now looks very out of date in the light of this."
Dr. Robert Lanza, chief science officer of Advanced Cell Technology in America, said: "This work represents a tremendous scientific milestone - the biological equivalent of the Wright Brothers' first airplane."
The number of different types of cells found in the body. Scientist found that all could be reproduced by stem cells
Year Prof James Thomson produced the first stem cells from human embryos
£100M In 2005 the British government said it would make this amount of cash available for stem cell research
Major illnesses cells could treat
ParkinsonOs disease. Caused by the degeneration and loss of specific brain cells Stem cells could transplanted to replace these lost cells
Heart disease. Stem cells could be used to replace missing or damaged muscle cells and remake blood vessels to restore blood flow
Stem cells could replace liver cells damaged by conditions such as cirrhosis or Hepatitis
Ty pe one diabetes. Stem cells could be used to create cells that produce insulin
Blood cancers such as leukaemia. Stem cells could be used to replace bone marrow cells
HOW THE NEW STEM CELLS ARE CREATED
1 A sample of skin cells is taken from an adult
2 These are injected with a genetic chemical combination
3 The skin cells are transformed into pluripotent cells, which means they can be used to grow other types of human tissue, such as heart, brain or lungs. Previously these stem cells could only be found in human embryos, making research controversial