Teruhiko Wakayama

Published: December 2025 · Updated: January 2026

The researcher

Here is what Teruhiko Wakayama did that most people thought was impossible. In 1998, working in Ryuzo Yanagimachi’s laboratory at the University of Hawaii, he cloned mice using a microinjection technique for somatic cell nuclear transfer that was simpler and more reproducible than anything that had come before. The results were published in Nature. The mice were named Cumulina, after cumulus cells — the donor cell type. Cumulina lived a normal lifespan of two years and seven months, and she reproduced naturally. That last detail mattered enormously: it meant the cloning process had not introduced fatal defects.

The “Honolulu technique,” as it became known, turned into a standard protocol in labs worldwide. Before Wakayama, mammalian cloning was Dolly the sheep and a lot of failures. After Wakayama, it was a reproducible experimental method.

From Hawaii to RIKEN to Yamanashi

Wakayama moved to RIKEN, Japan’s largest comprehensive research institute, where he led a team studying epigenetic reprogramming — the molecular mechanism that determines whether a cloned embryo develops normally or fails. The question was not just “can we clone?” but “why does cloning usually fail?” Most nuclear transfer embryos die. Wakayama wanted to know what distinguishes the ones that don’t.

Later, at the University of Yamanashi, he continued pushing the boundaries. His group explored serial recloning (cloning from clones), the effects of long-term cryopreservation on nuclear transfer success, and the fundamental limits of reprogramming. This was painstaking work — hundreds of embryo transfers, meticulous record-keeping, many failures for each success. The kind of science that does not make headlines but makes the headlines possible.

Why Venice in 2005

The first Future of Science conference had a theme — “Science and Society” — that was practically designed for someone like Wakayama. Cloning sits at the exact intersection of scientific capability and public anxiety. In 2005, the debates were raw: the Bush administration had banned federal funding for new stem cell lines; South Korea’s Hwang Woo-suk was claiming breakthroughs in human cloning that would turn out to be fabricated (the scandal broke in December of that year). Wakayama’s actual, verified, reproducible results in mice offered a reality check.

His Venice presentation addressed what cloning can and cannot do, what the ethical constraints should be, and — perhaps most usefully — what the technical limitations mean for the ethical debate. Some fears about cloning, he argued, are based on science fiction rather than science. The real questions are harder and less dramatic: efficiency, epigenetic fidelity, the welfare of cloned animals.

He shared the programme with Giulio Giorello, the Milan philosopher of science who framed the conference’s argument for scientific freedom, and with Umberto Veronesi himself — the oncologist born in Milan on 28 November 1925 who had invented quadrantectomy, founded the European Institute of Oncology, served as Italy’s Minister of Health, and created the foundation that organised the entire conference series. Different fields, same conviction: science matters, and scientists have a duty to explain why.

After the conference

Wakayama’s research continued to generate results and, occasionally, controversy. (The 2014 STAP cell episode at RIKEN, in which his laboratory was peripherally involved, led to a painful institutional reckoning — though Wakayama himself was among the first to call for the retraction of the disputed papers.) We note this not to litigate it but because it underscores a theme of the 2005 conference: the relationship between scientific institutions, individual integrity, and public trust is never simple.