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.