With two papers highlighting new sources of pluripotent stem cells, and a US presidential race shifting into high gear, a decade-old science policy challenge is inflamed again.

摘要

Not long ago, the phrase "stem cell" was an obscure piece of laboratory jargon, lacking even a consistent definition. It could refer to a fork in the hematopoietic cell lineage, which gives rise to the diverse types of blood cells, or to one of the well-established lines of cultured cells used for knocking out genes in laboratory mice. At the end of 1998, it could also have come up in a journal club meeting, talking about a paper by James Thomson, PhD, and his colleagues at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, who had derived stable lines of human embryonic stem cells.