Robert Lanza, MD

By: Gosta Gahrton, The New England Journal of Medicine, June 29, 2006

After Ernest A. MCCulloch and James E. Till received the Albert Lasker Medical Research Award in Basic Research in 2005, they wrote a commentary in Nature Medicine. In it, they asked themselves, “Why now?” After all, their papers on the colony-assay model of cells from the mouse spleen — which described for the first time the hematopoietic stem cell of the bone marrow as a cell that is capable of both self-renewal and differentiation — are more than 40 years old. This book seems to have the answers.

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Steve Goldman (University of Rochester Medical Center)

The definition of a stem cell — like that of beauty — lies in the eyes of the beholder. Do stem cells strictly refer to embryonic stem cells and primordial germ cells — the pluripotent and self-renewing derivatives of blastocysts and embryonic gonads? Or should we include the multipotent but tissue-specified precursors of fetal organogenesis?

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Source: Scientific American June 2004 issue

Stem cells raise the prospect of regenerating failing body parts and curing diseases that have so far defied drug-based treatment. Patients are buoyed by reports of the cells’ near-miraculous properties, but many of the most publicized scientific studies have subsequently been refuted, and other data have been distorted in debates over the propriety of deriving some of these cells from human embryos.

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