For many biologists, the ‘holy grail’ has been to derive pluripotent cells that have the potential to differentiate into all cell types of the body. They represent enormous scientific value as they can be used to study differentiation, the onset of disease and, in the long term, offer a significant therapeutic potential (Colman and Dreesen, 2009). Long before Martin Evans derived the first mouse embryonic stem cells (Evans and Kaufman, 1981), which are considered to be the ‘gold standard’ of pluripotency, scientists were already developing processes to convert somatic cells, which are derived from adult tissues, into the early, pre-gastrulation cells of an embryo that, like embryonic stem cells, can give rise to all cell types of the body. The ability to convert cells in such as a manner has significant implications for human health, understanding development and ageing, and providing therapeutic approaches to rejuvenate damaged or injured tissue. Whilst many investigators have sought to derive reprogrammed cells using a number of approaches, there have been three key events that have exerted a profound influence on this field. The first of these was the work of Professor Sir John Gurdon who had the ingenuity in 1958 to predict that the egg possesses powerful factors that regulate the way genes are expressed during very early development (Gurdon et al., 1958). Specifically, Gurdon took somatic nuclei from frog cells and introduced these into enucleated eggs to generate a live offspring. The ability to generate an offspring using this approach revolutionized our thinking about how a fully matured cell could be reprogrammed to an embryonic state. This major breakthrough laid the seeds of foundation for years of investigative work that attempted to generate mammalian clones using a similar approach. However, this work, although marginalized for a very long time in terms of its impact, opened up the field of epigenetics and how gene expression is regulated during development. Now, we apply this knowledge to understand how early developmental events can prime the individual for the onset of specific diseases later in life. Indeed, it took 39 years for the second major event to provide us