Professor Robin Lovell-Badge, of the Medical Research Council's National Institute For Medical Research, said the work was exciting, but work was required to end the reliance on viruses, and to tease out why two different techniques produced similar results.

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But the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council, which advises the federal government, thinks otherwise.

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The study, funded by the Wellcome Trust and the Medical Research Council, was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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