On November 6, 1998, Science published a short paper that changed stem cell research: James A. Thomson and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin–Madison reported deriving and continuously culturing pluripotent cell lines from human blastocysts. The same month, John Gearhart’s team at Johns Hopkins reported related pluripotent cultures from primordial germ cells. Together, those results…
Long before laboratory dishes held embryonic or induced pluripotent stem cells, physicians were already moving blood-forming cells from one person to another. The clinical path to what we now call hematopoietic stem cell transplantation runs through mid-century radiation biology, failed early grafts, identical-twin experiments, tissue typing, and decades of work led most prominently by E….
Ask most people what’s in urine and “stem cells” is not an answer they’d usually guess. Yet for more than a decade, researchers have been quietly harvesting a small, resilient population of stem-like cells shed into urine and using them for everything from kidney disease research to bladder tissue engineering. Because the name sounds similar…
Between 2006 and 2007, Yamanaka’s team and Thomson’s team showed that ordinary somatic cells could be reprogrammed to a pluripotent state—reshaping science, ethics debates, and the public narrative of stem cell research.
A factual look at how the Dickey-Wicker Amendment, the 2001 Bush funding limits, and the 2009 Obama policy shift shaped what U.S. federal dollars could support in human embryonic stem cell research.
In Toronto in the early 1960s, James Till and Ernest McCulloch turned irradiated-mouse spleen colonies into the first rigorous experimental proof that blood-forming stem cells exist.
Why stem cell research is controversial, how U.S. policy has changed from 2001 to 2026, and where the ethical debate stands today.