Cloning
Artificial insemination, DNA, genetically engineered animals, anti-aging drugs, Genome project (human gene sequence), stem cell research.
The year 2005 through 2010

The year 2005.


• 2/9/2005 - Dolly creator gets license to clone human embryos by AP.
      London - The scientist, Ian Wilmut, who led the team that created by cloning Dolly the sheep at Scotland's Roslin Institute in 1996, was granted a cloning license by British regulators to study how nerve cells go awry to cause motor neuron diseases.    This is another major step for medical research: cloning human embryos and extracting stem cells to unravel the mysteries of muscle-wasting illnesses like Lou Gehrig's disease.    The experiments do not involve cloned babies, but the license has stirred fresh controversy over the issue.
• 2/20/2005 - Panel approves resolution to ban some human cloning by AP.
      United Nations - A bitterly divided U.N. committee approved a resolution calling on 191 nations to ban all forms of human cloning incompatible with human dignity and the protection of human life.    Supporters of stem-cell research says the declaration is vague as if banning all forms of cloning.    The resolution now goes to the U.N. General Assembly for a final vote and if approved would only be a recommendation, not a legal requirement.
• 2/27/2005 - Moving stem cells to the fore - Researchers will begin testing humans - by Andrew Pollack, New York Times News Service.
      Irvine, Calif. - Dr. Hans S. Keirstead of the University of California, might be the Pied Piper of stem cells - and not just because he makes rats walk that were paralyzed, but because he helped lure Californians to approve spending on embryonic stem cell research over the next decade, along with Christopher Reeve, the wheel-chair-bound actor before he died.    He plans to try to treat people who have recent spinal cord injuries, in what would be the first human trial of any therapy derived from such cells.    Opponents think it is too soon to test his technique on humans just because it worked on rats, and should be tested on dogs and monkeys first.    He is fueled by money from Geron, a menlo Park California biotechnology company, which is eager to demonstrate to investors that practical use of stem cells is not a distant dream.    The cells must be inserted into the spinal columns of the patient at the same time they have an operation to help prevent further damage
• 4/27/2005 - Stem-cell guidelines proposed by AP.
      Washington - A government advisory group proposed national ethical guidelines for human embryonic stem-cell research and recommended research institutions establish oversight committees to enforce them.    Donors must give their consent before their embryo could be used to produce stem cells, and have the right to withdraw them at any point before it is derived, and cannot be paid.    The donor should be informed that the embryos will be destroyed after used and the cell lines may be kept for many years, and they can not share in any financial benefit from the results.    The oversight committee will keep all the information about the process, and a secure coding system to protect the identity of donors.    No animal embryonic stem cells should be transplanted into human embryo and approval is required before the human cells are put into an animal.    No human embryonic stem cells should be put into nonhuman primates.    Federal funding is still banned but private funding is still allowed.
• 4/28/2005 - Korean is leader in cloning human embryos by Bo-Mi Lim, Associated Press.
      Seoul, South Korea - In Hwang Woo-suk's Seoul lab it takes mere minutes to clone what will become a pig embryo, by poking a hole in a pig egg and gently sqeezing out its genetic content.    Then they insert the new genetic material from the cloning candidate.    The same can be done to clone a human embryo, a technological first accomplished at the lab last year to international clamor.    The Vatican and President Bush condemned the work, and the South Korean government reacted with pride.    The idea is to clone human embryos not to make babies but to harvest human embryonic stem cells.    Hwang's technique of squeezing the genetic material out of the eggs is much more effective than sucking them out, shortening the process which could have taken decades to achieve.    Hwang, 52, earned a doctorate as a veterinarian and created South Korea's first cloned cow in 1999, and genetically engineered cows that are resistant to mad cow disease, and genetically modified pigs whose organs may be transplanted into humans.
      As to egg collection, to clone, he needs a fresh supply of women's eggs.    Donors are given hormone injections that cause them to superovulate several eggs at once.
• 5/20/2005 - Koreans streamline cloning to harvest stem cells by Gina Kolata, The New York Times.
      A team of South Korean researchers has developed a highly efficient recipe for producing human embryos by cloning and then extracting their stem cells.    They have produced 11 human stem cell lines that are genetic matches of 11 patients aged 2 to 56, which in the past was very difficult just to produce a single stem cell line.    Their method is called therapeutic cloning, which involved 18 women.    Eleven patients participated - eight adults with spinal cord injuries and three children with various illnesses, thus giving them genetic matches of patients.    To direct the stem cells to develop into specific tissue types the embryos had to be genetic matches to patients.    The only way to do that is to use embryos that were clones of patients.    So from these results it seems much more efficient to clone and obtain human stem cells than it is to do the same experiment in animals.
• 5/20/2005 - Stem-Cell Debate: Issue splits House GOP differing plans offered by Laurie Kellman, Associated Press.
      Washington - House Republican leaders are throwing their weight behind a bill to encourage stem-cell research that used blood from umbilical cords.    This offers an alternative to spending government money for research that would destroy human embryos.    Cord blood cells are similar to embryonic cells but can grow into fewer types of tissues.
• 5/21/2005 - Bush pledges to veto bills easing stem-cell funding by Deb Riechmann, Associated Press.
      Washington - President Bush condemed stem cell research advances in South Korea and said he would veto any legislation aimed at loosening limits in the U.S.    He is worried about a world in which cloning becomes acceptable, and will not allow federal money from taxpayers to be used to destroy life in order to save life.   
• 5/25/2005 - House OKs stem cell research by Sheryl Gay Stolberg, The New York Times.
      Washington - The House passed a bill to expand federal financing for embryonic stem cell research, defying the President's veto.
• 5/28/2005 - Governor vetoes stem-cell research bill by AP.
      Boston - Governor Mitt Romney vetoed a bill that would expand embryonic stem cell research in Massachusetts, but the measure has enough support in the legislature to override the veto.    The provision allows therapeutic cloning.
• 6/17/2005 - Five miracle treatments headed your way - the future by David Ewing Duncan, "The Genetisits Who Played Hoops With My DNA".
      We've heard it for years: Science is going to regenerate hearts when our originals wear out ... create super drugs that will make us forever svelte ... fend off nasty viruses ... make us forever young.
      Many miracles already have arrived.    Antibiotics, vaccines and better nutrition have extended American's life span from 47 in 1900 to nearly 80 today.    That's nothing, scientists say, compared to what's coming.    Here's a sampling of what may be ahead for our children or grandchildren.
  
  • Wired brains - Sophisticated imaging scanners allow researchers to draw maps of which regions of the brain activate when people are depressed, hungry, adding, or planning, and basically how it works.    Implants in nearly 100,000 people now prevent epileptic seizures, as well as muscle tremors caused by Parkinson's disease, in severe cases.    Some deaf people have implants that process sounds that are imputed into nerves that feed into the brain and allow them to hear.    Last year, the first human, a quadriplegic, was implanted with electrodes in his brain.    A computer translates electrical signals in his gray matter, letting him operate a computer (play games, send e-mail) using only thought.
  • Growing new parts - Doctors are already using adult stem cells that are ready to grow into replacement cells for certain organs, such as damaged corneas and skin.    Heart cells are not far behind.    Stem cells derived from human embryos may in the future grow into any cell for treatments or cures for everything from diabetes to Alzheimer's disease.
  • Long, long lives - If you understood the mechanisms of keeping things repaired, you could keep things going indefinetely claims the geneticist who discovered a set of genes in worms that control a pathway of genes that regulate aging, increasing the worm's life span by six times.    Mice life span has already been extended by more than 30%, and they expect even longer-lived mice.    The goal is to develop a Fountain of Youth pill delaying the diseases of aging, with lives up to 200 years.
  • Artificial "servants" - No one is near creating an artifical human, or even a multi-celled creature.    In 2002 and 2003, two labs for the first time created artifical viruses by designing a genetic recipe from scratch.    Research approved by the Department of Energy to study the genomes of microbes all over the planet, in hope to build a bacterium that could eat pollution from power plants, or convert the sun's energy into hydrogen fuel.
  • Killing bad bugs - Scientists try to improve and expand traditional vaccines and antibiotics, even as viruses and bacteria mutate and new strains appear.    Research is leading a new generation of drugs for viruses like hepatitis C, which afflicts 30,000 people a year, within five years.    They are also working on methods that shut down a specific bacterium's ability to mutate so it will not become impervious to antibiotics.
• 6/21/2005 - Embryo cloning technique emerges by AP.
      Copenhagen, Denmark - Scientists have cloned human embryos for the first time using eggs matured in a laboratory - a technique that might help cloning become a viable option for growing patient's own replacement tissue to treat diseases.    The experiment, outlined at the annual conference of the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology, brings the Belgians to the forefront of human therapeutic cloning aimed at producing stem cells that are a genetic match for injured or sick patients.    Until now, scientists have used only mature eggs to create cloned embryos, but if immature eggs work, the egg supply problem might be significantly eased, said Josiane Van der Elst, who conducted the research at Ghent University in Belgium.    About 10 percent of eggs retrieved from women durng infertility treatment are immature.
• 8/23/2005 - Breakthrough on stem cells only scientific - Political standoff lacks any progress - by Laurie Kellman, Associated Press.
      Washington - Stem cell science might be advancing, but not fast or far enough to break the standoff between President Bush and Congress over federal funding for the research.    An announcement that Harvard scientists had found a way to fuse adult skin cells with the embryonic stem cells raised the possibility that someday, all-purpose stem cells could be created without harming human embryos.    These fused cells were reprogrammed to their embryonic state, but the technique is 10 years away before it is usable in people.
• 9/20/2005 - Human stem cells may repair spinal cord injuries, study with mice suggests by Lauran Neergaard, Associated Press.
      Washington - Injections of human stem cells seem to directly repair some of the damage caused by spinal cord injury, according to research that helped partially paralyzed mice walk again.    These cells not only form new nerve cells, but also formed cells that create the biological insulation that nerve fibers need to communicate.    A number of neurological diseases, such as multiple sclerosis, involve loss of that insulation, called myelin.    "The actual cells (fetal neural) that we transplanted, the human cells, are the ones that make myelin," said lead researcher Aileen Anderson of the University of California, Irvine.    The researchers injured the spinal cords of mice and nine days later injected some with the human neural stem cells.    Four months later, the treated mice could again step normally with their hind paws.    Mice given no treatment showed no improvement.
      Anderson also afterward injected the animals with diphtheria toxin, which kills only human cells, not mouse cells.    The improvments in walking disappeared, suggesting it was the cells themselves responsible for recovery.
  
  The year 2006.
  
  
• 1/10/2006 - Scientist's claims of cloned human stem cells were fake by Bo-Mi Lim, Associated Press.
      Seoul, South Korea - The now-disgraced South Korean researcher Hwang Woo-suk, who claimed to have cloned human embryonic stem cells faked his results and had no proof to show that the stem cells were ever created.    Although he did create the world's first cloned dog.    He has not resigned as to date and claims that other researchers in his lab maliciously switched some of his stem cells.    So the promising field of stem-cell research is still years behind where they thought it was.
• 2/27/2006 - 2 stem cell cases go to trial today by Associated Press.
      San Francisco - The future of embryonic stem cell research could be shaped in a courtroom where two taxpayer groups are challenging the legality of California's new agency, California Institute of Regenerative Medicine, dedicated to the controversial field.
• 2/28/2006 - Pope: In vitro fertilization embryos have right to life by Associated Press.
      Vatican City - Pope Benedict XVI said that embryos developed for in vitro fertilization deserve the same right to life as fetuses, children and adults - and that the right extends to embryos even before they are transferred into a woman's womb.    The Vatican has long held that human life begins at conception, but Benedict specified that even embryo in its earliest stages is just as much a human life as an older being.    The Vatican opposes it because the embryos are often discarded, whereas others are frozen and used for experimentation or to create stem cells.
• 3/8/2006 - Stem-cell research at U of L 'major step' - Nerve-repair work offers hope for treating array of disorders - by Laura Ungar, The Courier-Journal.
      University of Louisville - A rat with a spinal cord injury scurries across the rope without a problem, just weeks after an injection containing adult stem cells from a human nose that were transformed into nerve cells.    A research team at James Graham Brown Cancer Center has transformed stem cells from adult mice into brain, heart, nerve and pancreatic cells.    The nasal stem-cell research involved using certain chemicals to direct the cells to become neurons said Scott Whittemore, the scientific director of U of L's Kentucky Spinal Cord Injury Research Center.
      They stated that clinical studies in humans could be anywhere from three to 10 years off.
      The tissue was taken from adults undergoing elective sinus surgery who volunteered for an endoscopic biopsy, where they use compounds to coax the cells into becoming neurons that attach to muscle tissue in the lab.    The newly created cells can also produce myelin, a protective coating that insulates the nervous system.    The research now makes them realize that they can repair spinal cord injury with rejection or the need for anti-rejection drugs.
• 3/17/2006 - Disgraced scientist loses stem cell license by Associated Press.
      Seoul, South Korea - South Korea's government revoked permission for disgraced scientist Hwang Woo-suk to conduct embryonic stem cell research.    He was also dismissed from his post at Seoul National university, along with six other professors.
• 3/25/2006 - Scientists say mice cells like embryonic stem cells by Associated Press.
      New York - German scientist, Dr. Gerd Hasenfuss of Georg-August-University of Goettingen, say cells from the testes of mice can behave like embryonic stem cells.    If the same holds true in humans, it could provide a controversy-free source of versatile cells for use in treating disease.    The mouse cells gave rise to a variety of specialized cells, including heart cells that contracted and nerve cells that produced dopamine.
• 3/26/2006 - Three new mouse studies boost hopes for a cure for Type 1 diabetes by Gina Kolata, The New York Times.
      Three groups of scientists say they replicated a controversial finding: Severely diabetic mice can recover on their own if researchers squelch an immune system attack that is causing the disease.    This raises hopes for people with Type 1 diabetes, which occurs in puberty and afflicts an estimated half-million to a million Americans.    They used embryonic stem cells as replacement cells for diabetics, if possible in mice, and it holds true in humans, adding the cells as the source of new pancreas cells may benefit.    This means they would have to find a way to prod the cells to turn into insulin-secreting pancreas cells.
• 4/22/2006 - Judge upholds stem-cell institute in Calif. by Paul Elias, Associated Press.
      San Francisco - California's $3 billion stem-cell research institute is a legitimate state agency the judge ruled, which was approved by 59 percent of the state's voters.
• 5/7/2006 - Bush: Don't be enslaved by technology by Associated Press.
      Stillwater, Okla. - President Bush advised college graduates to use technology but not become enslaved by it.    "Science offers the prospect of eventual cures for terrible diseases - and temptations to manipulate life and violate human dignity," Bush said during commencement exercises at Oklahoma State University.    "My advice is that science serves the cause of humanity and not the other way around."
• 5/13/2006 - Cloning scientist indicted on fraud allegations by Associated Press.
      Seoul, South Korea - South Korean prosecutors indicted Hwang Woo-suk on charges of fraud, embezzlement and bioethics violations in a scandal.    He faces a maximum sentence of life in prison if convicted.
• 5/22/2006 - Senate stall on stem-cell research prolongs suffering
      During this year of inaction, 100 million Americans who suffer from Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, dibetes, spinal cord injuries, cancer and other diseases must wait for cures that embryonic stem cell research can deliver.    Their fate is in the hands of 100 elected senators, and scientist believe in the future of embryonic stem cell research may hold the key to whole new generation of treatments and cures.    H.R. 810 is in the hand of the Senate, who must ensure efficient, ethical and responsible research will occur.
• 6/7/2006 - Harvard launches program to create embryonic stem cells by Rick Weiss, The Washington Post.
      Harvard University announced that it is starting a privately funded, multimillon-dollar program to create cloned human embryos as sources of medically promising stem cells.
• 7/17/2006 - Showdown expected over bills on stem cells by Jennifer Brooks, Gannett News Service.
      Washington - Congress and the Bush administration are heading toward their first veto fight as the Senate prepares for a vote that would lift the administration's limits on federally funded research on human embryos.    The embryonic stem cell bill has broad support in Congress and in national polls and likely will pass when it comes to its vote.    President Bush has threatened a veto, which would be his first in six years in office.    On 7/19 the Senate defied the veto threat and voted 63-37, four votes short of the two-thirds needed to override a veto, and sent the bill to Bush.
• 7/25/2006 - EU approves funding for stem-cell research by Associated Press.
      Brussels, Belgium - The European Union decided to continue funding research on human embryonic stem cells, although new rules adopted by the 25-nation bloc prevent human cloning and destroying embryos.    The money will come from EU's $65 billion research budget for 2007-2013, when the new rules expire.    Poland, Austria, Malta, Slovakia and Lithuania voted against the updated rules for "ethical and moral" reasons.
• 7/26/2006 - Vatican condemns EU plan to fund stem-cell research by Associated Press.
      Vatican City - The Vatican has condemned a decision by the EU to continue funding embryonic stem-cell research, and called it "unacceptable for the church."
• 8/24/2006 - Stem-cell advance is announced - Company says process won't destroy embryo - by Matt Crenson, Associated Press.
      New York - A biotech company Advanced Cell Technology Inc. in Alameda, Calif., has found a new way of making stem cells without destroying embryos.    The new method works by taking an embryo at a very early stage of development and removing a single cell, which can be coaxed into spawing an embryonic stem-cell line.    With only one cell removed the rest of the embryo retains its full potential for development.    The technique was achieved in mice.    The fertility procedure, known as preimplantation genetic diagnosis, or PGD, is used when parents want to avoid having a child with a lethal or severely debilitating birth defect.    About 1,000 such procedures are performed each year in the United States.    PGD begins with in-vitro fertilization to produce numerous embryos.    When the embryos are no more than a ball of eight to 10 cells, a technician extracts a single cell from each one.    The extracted cells are tested for genetic disorders, and those free of defect are then implanted in the mother in hope that they will develop.
• 8/27/2006 - Church criticizes new stem-cell method by Associated Press.
      Vatican City - A Vatican official, Monsignor Elio Sgreccia, on bioethical questions, criticized a new method of making stem cells that does not require the destruction of embryos, calling it a "manipulation" that did not address the church's ethical concerns.    The method devised by Advanced Cell Technology Inc. in Alameda, Calif., remains an in vitro form of reproduction, which the church opposes.
• 11/8/2006 - Senate votes to end ban on cloning for stem cells by Associated Press.
      Canberra, Australia - Australia's Senate narrowly voted to end the country's four-year ban on cloning human embryos for stem cell research, ruling that the potential for medical breakthroughs outweighed moral doubts.    The decision sets the stage for the ban to be lifted entirely.    The measure now goes to Australia's House of Representatives, but lawmakers had expected the Senate to pose the biggest hurdle.
• 11/9/2006 - Transplanting of cells helps mice's vision by The Washington Post.
      Washington - Blind mice regained some ability to see after getting transplants of cells taken from the eyes of other mice, strengthening the prospect that it might be possible to restore vision in people someday, scientists from London and Michigan reported.    Of course it would be years before this could be tried on people who have lost their vision from macular degeneration.    They achieved this by taking light-detecting retina cells from other animals but which have begun to grow from human embryonic stem cells, which can orient themselves properly after being injected into a blind eye, connect to other nerve cells and communicate appropriately with visual centers in the brain.    Of course this is being researched at the biotech firm Advanced Cell Technology in Worcester, Mass.
• 12/7/2006 - Parliament lifts ban on cloning for research by AP.
      Canberra, Australia - Lawmakers took sides with medical researchers and rejected the moral views of their political leaders, Prime Minister John Howard, his two deputies and opposition parties, and lifted a 4-year ban on cloning human embryos for stem-cell research.    The argument that the sanctity of human life must take precedence over potential cures for diseases such as diabetes, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's did not justify the ban.
• 12/19/2006 - State to invest in stem cell research by AP.
      Trenton, N.J. - State officials announce plans to invest $7 million next year in federally restricted embryonic stem cell research and $3 million for less controversial research into adult stem cells.    Gov. Jon S. Corzine called the grants and recently passed legislation to spend $270 million on stem cell research facilities "a serious and vital investment in this life-saving research."
• 12/26/2006 Struggling farmer wants to sell cloned cows for food by AP.
      Williamsport, Md. - For nearly four years, dairy farmer Greg Wiles has poured milk from his cloned cows down the drain in compliance with a voluntary ban on food from cloned livestock.    Now in financial straits, Wiles says he may be forced to sell his cloned cows for hamburger.    The FDA says that's probably safe, but pressure from the food industry has kept the agency from approving it.    Wiles can't wait because he is facing eviction in a bitter family business dispute, and is forcing him to sell his two cloned cows.    The dairy industry says there are at least 150 livestock clones in the U.S., each making about 128 glasses of milk every day, and cows sold to ground beef plants can produce more than 3,000 hamburger patties.    Consumer groups are concerned that these commercial farms are not adhering to the voluntary moratorium and putting the meat and milk into the food supply.
  
  The year 2007.
  
  
• 1/8/2007 Amniotic stem cells may save embryos by Los Angeles Times.
      Researchers have found stem cells in human amniotic fluid that appear to have many of the key benefits of embryonic stem cells while avoiding their knottiest ethical, medical and logistical drawbacks.    The stem cells are harvested from left over amniocentesis tests given to prevent pregnant women - were able to transform into bone, heart muscle, blood vessels, fat, and nerve and liver tissues.    According to Dr. Anthony Atala, director of the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, N.C. claims they were successful with every cell type they have attempted to produce.
      Studies on amniotic fluid stem cells is already being funded by the National Institute of Health, and has the advantage of no tumors forming when implanted in lab animals.
• 1/12/2007 House OKs funding stem-cell studies by Andrew Taylor, AP.
      Washington - The Democratic-controlled House passed a bill bolstering embryonic stem cell research by 253-174 vote which is short of the two-thirds margin required to overturn President Bush's option to veto.    Dr. Robert Lanza, a top stem-cell researcher at Advanced Cell Technology Inc. said that stem cell based treatments could be just a few years away for eye and spinal cord injuries, and a decade before treatments are available for diabetes and Alzheimer's.
• 2/17/2007 Millions awarded for stem cell research by AP.
      Burlingame, Calif. - Along with Gov. Arnold Schwarzeneggar, California's stem cell agency the Institute for Regenerative Medicine doled out nearly $45 million in research grants to about 20 state universities and nonprofit research laboratories.
• 3/20/2007 Agency chief: Lift stem cell curb by AP.
      Washington - Regarding the agency's proposed 2008 budget, Dr. Elias Zerhouni the chief of the National Intitutes of Health told the Senate health appropriations subcommittee that lifting the ban on taxpayer funding of research on new stem cells from fertilized embryos would better serve both science and the nation.
• 3/26/2007 Scientists reignite debate over interspecies cloning by Paul Elias, AP.
      San Francisco - Nearly a decade ago, Michigan State University researcher Jose Cibelli plugged his own DNA into a cow's egg in a cloning attempt that was condemned as unethical by President Bill Clinton.    Cibelli patented the so-called interspecies cloning technique, but abandoned the research as a failure.    Now it is all brewing all over again as three teams of British scientists from the Stem Cell Laboratory at King's College in London have reignited the moral debate over inserting human genes into animal eggs by proposing experiments similar to Cibelli's.
      Their goal is to eliminate the need for women to donate eggs for the cloning of human embryos to enable them to better understand the genetic causes of many diseases and design personalized medicines.    They want to take DNA from patients with a disease like Alzheimer's and fuse it with cow eggs from which all genetic material has been removed.    After five days of growth, the cloned embryos would be destroyed and the stem cells extracted.    The stem cells would be grown in labs so they could look for the onset of diseases and test experimental drugs on the cells.
• 4/11/2007 Stem-cell bill sure to get veto by AP.
      Washington - Senate supporters of embryonic stem cell research refused to take no for an answer, advancing the legislation that is assured of passage, but is doomed to a veto.    Polls show public support for the research is strong - 61 percent.
• 4/12/2007 Senate OKs stem-cell research by David Espo, AP.
      Washington - A stubborn Senate voted to ease restrictions on federally funded embryonic stem cell research, ignoring President Bush's threat of a second veto.    The 63-34 vote was shy of the margin needed to enact the measure over presidential opposition.    The Senate also voted 70-28 to pass a measure supporting research using adult stem cells, which Bush will approve.
• 6/7/2007 Stem cell work in mice shows promise - Approach avoids destroying embryos by Malcolm Ritter, AP.
      New York - In a leap forward for stem cell research, three independent teams of scientists (Konrad Hochedlinger of Harvard Stem Cell Institute, Rudolf Jaenisch of the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Mass., and Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University in Japan) reported that they have produced the equivalent of embryonic stem cells in mice using skin cells without the controversial destruction of embryos.    If the same could be done with human skin cells it would lead to a breakthrough in the ethical and political debates.
• 6/8/2007 House backs more stem-cell research by Joel Havemann, Los Angeles Times.
      Washington - The House approved legislation to relax the limits on embryonic stem cell research, sending it to the White House, where it faced a certain veto.
• 6/21/2007 President vetoes stem-cell measure - Issue may play role in 2008 election by The New York Times.
      Washington - For the second time, President Bush vetoed a measure lifting his restrictions on human embryonic stem cell experiments.
• 11/11/2007 Think tank warns of need to outlaw human cloning by AP.
      London - The international community faces a stark choice: outlaw human cloning or prepare for the creation of cloned humans, researchers said.    Previous attempts to reach a binding worldwide treaty foundered over divisions on whether to outlaw all cloning or permit cloning of cells for research.    The best solution may be to ban human cloning but to allow countries to conduct strictly controlled therapeutic research, including stem cell research, according to the report from the Japan-based United Nations University Institute for Advanced Studies.
      Almost all countries oppose human cloning, and more than 50 nations have introduced laws banning it.    But lack of binding global legislation gives scientists an opening to create human clones in countries where bans do not exist.
• 11/15/2007 Stem cell technology developed at U of L sold by The Courier-Journal.
      Stem Cell Technologies Inc., which grew out of ground breaking adult stem-cell research at the University of Louisville, has been acquired by New York-based NeoStem Inc., a publicly traded company that collects and banks adult stem cells.    Stem Cell's parent company, UTEK Corp., received 400,000 shares of NeoStem stock, which was worth $900,000.
      The U of L research involved coaxing stem cells from adult mice to change into brain, heart and other specialized cells -- mimicking the ability of embryonic stem cells.    That discovery, announced in late 2005, could lead to disease treatments without the controversy over embryonic stem cells.    The research was led by Mariusz Ratajczak, head of the stem cell biology program at U of L's James Graham Brown Cancer Center.    His team identified a type of very small cells that mobilize into the bloodstream to help repair damaged tissue after strokes in mice.    Then they developed a technology to isolate similar cells in adult human bone marrow.
• 11/15/2007 Cloned embryos yield stem cells by AP.
      New York - A team of Oregon researchers has gleaned stem cells from cloned monkey embryos, but is not likely to lead to actual medical treatments any time soon.    Even if the method describe works in humans, it would require too much of a precious resource -- women's unfertilized eggs.    The promise of producing stem cells by cloning is that cells can be genetically matched to a particular patient.    So doctors should be able to transplant tissue created from cloned cells into that person without tissue rejection.    Such transplants could help treat such conditions as diabetes and spinal cord injury.    It has already been done in mice, and this is the first attempt in primates, but they have a long way to go to get an efficient method to work in humans.
• 11/21/2007 Embryos bypassed to create stem cells by Los Angeles Times.
      Researchers from Japan's Kyoto University by Dr. Shinya Yamanaka and the University of Wisconsin led by Dr. James Thomson reported that they have reprogrammed mature human cells to behave almost exactly like embryonic stem cells, by activating a handfull of dormant genes, which coaxed the cells back to a point in embryonic development before they committed to become a particular type of tissue.    The rejuvenated cells were able to grow into all the body's main tissue types, including muscle, gut, cartilage, neurons and heart cells.    The discovery provides a clear road map for creating genetically matched replacement cells that could be used to treat patients for a variety of diseases, the goal of regenerative medicine.    This provides an alternative to the cloning process and the destruction of embryos.
      A key hurdle is the viruses employed to turn on the genes cause mutations that can lead to cancer, and one of the genes has a tendency to cause tumors.
• 12/7/2007 Stem-cell technique cures sickle cell in mice by AP.
      Washington - Scientists from the University of Alabama, Birmingham and the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts have the first evidence that the "reprogrammed stem cells" that made headlines last month really have the potential to treat disease: They used skin from the tails of sick mice to cure the rodents of sickle cell anemia, by coaxing them to grow into blood-producing cells, and replaced the sickle cell-causing gene with a health version.
• 12/16/2007 Stem cells are used to fix breasts after cancer surgery by AP.
      San Antonio - For the first time, doctors have used stem cells from liposuctioned fat to fix breast defects in two dozen women in Japan who have had cancerous lumps removed.    The approach is still experimental, but holds promise for women with that issue.
      The company that developed the treatment, San Diego-based Cytori Therapeutics plans larger studies in Europe and Japan next year.    More than 100,000 women have lumps removed each year in the U.S.
• 12/25/2007 Scientists weigh role of stem cells as possible cause of cancer by The New York Times.
      Within the next few months, researchers at three medical centers expect to start the first test in patients of one of the most promising ideas about the cause and treatment of cancer.    The stem-cell hypothesis says that cancers themselves may not die because they are fed by cancerous stem cells, a small and particularly dangerous kind of cell that can renew by dividing even as it spews out more cells that form the bulk of the tumor.    Worse, stem cells may be impervious to most standard cancer therapies.
      Researchers plan to target such stem cells with new drugs.    In 1994 a researcher reported finding cancerous stem cells in breast cancer patients, which today sparked interest in finding out about them.
  
  The year 2008.
  
  
• 1/11/2008 Rick Weiss by The Washington Post.
      Washington - Scientists in Massachusetts said that they had created several colonies of human stem cells without harming the embryos from which they were derived, the latest in a series of advances that could speed development of stem-cell-based treatments for a variety of diseases.
      In June, scientists in Japan and Wisconsin said they had made cells very similar to embryonic stem cells, without involving embryos.    But that technique so far requires the use of gene-altered viruses that contaminate the cells and limit their biomedical potential.
      The new work shows for the first time that healthy, normal embryonic stem cells can be cultivated directly from embryos without destroying them.    Now they expect to be eligible for federal financing since it does not harm embryos, said study leader Robert Lanza, chief scientific officer at Advanced Cell Technology in Worcestor, Mass.    Story Landis, head of the NIH stem cell task force, said the embryos used appear not to have been damaged, but it is impossible to know for sure, and a trial of transferring the cells to women's wombs and see if the resulting babies were normal.    But it would be unethical to do that experiment.    Mr. Lanza is angry over this in that the NIH and the Bush administration to show that an embryo was harmed.    The technique involves the careful removal of a single cell from a newly formed eight-cell to divide repeatedly until it forms a self-replenishing colony of embryonic stem cells.
      Fertility doctors perfom such "single-cell biopsies" thousands of times every year to test the genetic health of embryos conceived by in vitro fertilization, with little or no apparent effect on the remaining seven cells' ability to form a normal baby.
• 1/12/2008 Stem-cell discoveries.
      The federal government is in no rush to finance the potential of stem-cell-based treatment for a variety of diseases.    In 2001, President Bush limited the research on the number of embryonic stem cell lines that could be used in federally funded research and Congress tried to ease the restriction twice with the President vetoing it.    More than 60 percent of Americans favor embryonic stem cell research, since they know someone with diabetes, heart disease, and Alzheimer's.    Bush's restrictions have set back the research by four or five years, and the present ability to program adult skin cells to behave like embryonic stem cells has no guarantee to hold the same promise as their embryonic cousins.
      They will have to wait for a new President to come in to change the viewpoint.
• 1/18/2008 Company has cloned human embryos by AP.
      La Jolla, Calif. - Scientists at a California company, Stemagen, reported that they had created the first mature cloned human embryos from single skin cells taken from adults, which may advance the goal of growing personalized stem cells for patients with various diseases.    This is evidence that few, if any, technical barriers may remain to the creation of cloned babies, which may prompt renewed controversy on Capitol Hill.    Five of the new embryos grew in laboratory dishes to the stage that fertility doctors could transfer to a woman's womb -- a degree of development that clones of adult humans have never achieved before.    No one knows if the embryos were healthy enough to grow into babies.    It is still illegal to clone people, as unethical.    The company hopes to make embryos that are clones, or genetic twins, of patients, then harvest stem cells from those embryos and grow them into replacement tissues.    When transplanted into patients, the tissue would not be rejected because the immune system would see them as "self."
• 2/24/2008 Disease - Adult stem cells are being used to tackle a host of serious illnesses.
      Therapies using adult stem cells are being used to treat a growing list of diseases, such as lukemia, neuroblastoma and sickle cell anemia, and possibly autoimmune disorders such as multiple sclerosis.    Stem-cell transplants can turn an incurable disease into a curable disease, some diseases with no cure it can give them a 20 percent chance for a cure.
• 7/7/2008 S. Korean team says it has cloned endangered dog by AP.
      Seoul, South Korea - A South Korean team led by disgraced stem-cell scientist Hwang Woo-suk said it has created 17 clones of an endangered dog breed popular in China.    The Sooam Biotech Research Foundation said in a statement that the cloned Tibetan mastiff dogs were born in April, and cloned from two dogs a female and male, through six surrogate dogs.    The Kogene Biotech institute did not get their on DNA samples to test, but used the ones provided by the foundation.
• 8/20/2008 Stem-cell advance reported by Malcolm Ritter, AP.
      New York - Scientists at Advanced Cell Technology in Worcestor, Mass., the University of Illinois at Chicago and the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. say they've found an efficient way to make red blood cells from human embryonic stem cells, a possible step toward making transfusion supplies in the laboratory.    The promise of virtually limitless supply is tantalizing because of donor shortages and disappointments in creating blood substitutes.    The researchers said that the cells they made behaved like natural red blood cells in lab tests and their process could be used in large-scale production.    They also said the embryonic stem cells could someday supply O-negative "universal donor" red cells for transfusion.    They will have to determine if the cells will survive long enough in the human body to be useful, as natural red cells circulate for an average of 120 days.
• 8/28/2008 Cell identity switch may be breakthrough by Malcolm Ritter, AP.
      New York - Scientist have transformed one type of cell into another in living mice, a big step toward growing replacement tissues to treat a variety of diseases.    The cell identity switch turned ordinary pancreas cells into the rarer type that churns out insulin, essential for preventing diabetes.    So it goes beyond just diabetes to a host of possibilities by using the patient's own cells to treat disease or injury without turning to stem cells taken from embryos.
      Researcher John Gearhart of the University of Pennsylvania said this is a major leap in reprogramming cells of one kind to another in a living mice, and may someday allow them to grow new heart cells and nerve cells, when it is ready for people.
• 9/19/2008 FDA offers rules for genetically engineered animals by Karen Kaplan and Thomas H. Maugh II, Los Angeles Times.
      The Food and Drug Administration opened the way for a bevy of genetically engineered salmon, cows and other animals to leap from the laboratory to the marketplace, unveiling an approval process that would treat the modified creatures like drugs.    Although the guidelines make explicit the regulatory hoops companies would have to go through to sell salmon that grow twice as fast as wild fish, pigs with high levels of healthy omega-3 fatty acids in their meat or goats that produce beneficial proteins in their milk.    So the federal government has finally regulated these animals to ensure their safety, but does it go far enough since the approval process would be highly secretive and it does not cover the environmental effect of creating Frankenstein animals, since drugs do not go out and breed with other drugs.    The new regulations do not cover cloned animals, which are genetic replicas of existing animals.    Only one genetically engineered animal is now being sold in the U.S., a glow-in-the-dark aquarium fish called a zebra, approved because it is not eaten and requires warm water.    Labeling may not show the origin of the product and would only reflect the change in its content, such as more omega-3 fats.
• 10/23/2008 Britain widens scope for stem cell research by AP.
      London - British plans to allow scientists to use hybrid animal-human embryos for stem cell research won final approval from lawmakers in a sweeping overhaul of sensitive science laws.    The House of Commons also clarified laws that allow the screening of embryos to produce babies with suitable bone marrow or other material for transplant to sick siblings.
• 11/12/2008 Obama urged to oppose stem cell research by AP.
      Vatican City - Roman Catholic Church officials are sending messages to President-elect Obama saying they oppose any changes in U.S. policies on embryonic stem cell research.    Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan, the pope's health minister, reiterated the Vatican's opposition to using embryos for research purposes.    Obama supports relaxing the restrictions that Bush had issued.
• 11/19/2008 Woman gets transplant using own stem cells by AP.
      London - Doctor Eric Genden gave a woman a new windpipe with tissue grown from her own stem cells, eliminating the need for anti-rejection drugs.    He did a similar transplant in 2005 at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, using donor and recipient tissue.
  
  The year 2009.
  
• 1/23/2009 Firm to study use of stem cells in treating injuries by AP.
      A U.S. biotech company, Geron Corp. of Menlo Park, Calif., says it plans to start the world's first study of a treatment based on human embryonic stem cells -- a long-awaited project aimed at spinal cord injury this summer.    The company gained federal permission this week to inject eight to 10 patients with cells derived from embyronic cells, said Dr. Thomas Okarma, president and CEO of the company.    The patients will be paraplegics, who can use their arms but can't walk.    They will recieve a single injection within two weeks of their injury.    The study is aimed at testing the safety of the procedure, but doctors will also look for signs of improvement like return of sensation or movement in the legs.
• 1/25/2009 Stem cell trials excite medical community by Karen Kaplan, Los Angeles Times.
      Ushering in a new era in medicine, the U.S. FDA said Friday it had cleared the way for the world's first clinical trial of a therapy derived from human embryonic stem cells, because President Barack Obama has voiced strong support for the research in a reversal of the Bush administration policy.
• 2/11/2009 Repairing a damaged heart by Laura Ungar, The Courier-Journal.
      The University of Louisville and Jewish Hospital & St. Mary's Healthcare will conduct a clinical trial using adult cardiac stem cells to try to regrow dead heart muscle after heart attacks.    Dr. Piero Anversa, a physician at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston who is collaborating with Louisville doctors said it would be the only trial in the world to use cardiac stem cells from adult subjects will regenerate dead heart muscle by turning into heart muscle cells and other cell types.    They also hope to recruit 20 control subjects.    Dr. Roberto Bolli, Jewish Hopital Heart and Lung Institute Distinguished Chair in Cardiology will lead the groundbreaking study.    The trial uses adult stem cells taken from the patient's own cardiac tissue, removed during bypass surgery will be frozen and sent to Boston so the stem cells can be isolated, expanded and prepared before being sent back for use in the trial.    After the patient recovers for three or four months, doctors will inject the person's stem cells directly into the cardiac scar tissue using minimally invasive procedure that reaches the heart through a large artery in the leg.    There are risks from side effects which are unknown, but no risk from rejection.
• 2/18/2009 Stem cells said to cause boy's tumors by Lauran Neergaard, AP.
      Washington - A family desperate to save a child from a leathal brain disease, known as ataxia telangiectasia, or A-T, sought experimental injections of fetal stem cells -- injections that triggered tumors in the boy's brain and spinal cord, Israeli scientists reported.    With all the promises, researchers have long warned that they must learn to control newly injected stem cells so they don't grow where they shouldn't, and small studies in people are just beginning.    Cells are not drugs, they can misbehave in so many different ways, and it will take time to prove how best to pursue the potential therapy.    The boy had degeneration of a certain brain region that gradually robs him of movement, and a faulty immune system that leads to frequent infections and cancers.    Most die in their teens or early 20s.    When the boy was 9, the family went to a Moscow clinic that provided injections of neural stem cells from fetuses.    The cells were injected into his brain and spinal cord twice more, at ages 10 and 12.    At age 13, the boy began complaining of headaches.    Test in Tel Aviv uncovered the tumors.    Surgeons removed the spinal cord mass in 2006 and his condition has remained stable since.    A Tel Aviv University team tested the tumor tissue and concluded it was the fetal cells.
• 2/22/2009 Doctors: Cord blood therapy still unproven by Shari Roan, Los Angeles Times.
      Walking, smiling and fidgeting, 3-year-old Dallas Hextell has become a poster child for the promise of stem cell therapy, a cutting edge approach to treatment that may one day heal diseases such as diabetes, brain injury and Parkinson's disease.
      But he's also become a symbol, researchers say, of the worst side of experimental medicine: jumping to conclusions.    When Dallas was born his parents arranged for a private blood bank to collect and store their son's umbilical cord blood on the remote chance that he or another family member might some day need it.
      At 9 months, Dallas was diagnosed with cerebral palsy, a group of physical disorders related to brain injury around the time of birth.    The couple believes he improved drastically after having an infusion of his own cord blood in July 2007 at Duke University, as part of a trial of several dozen children.    The parents with Dallas appeared on NBC's "Today" show on mArch 11, 2008, to alert others to the lifesaving qualities of umbilical cord bllod and started a foundation about it.    The medical community did not agree with that because of lack of evidence.
• 3/6/2009 Stem cell cut-and-paste is 'major advance' by Karen Kaplan, Los Angeles Times.
      Borrowing a biological cut-and-paste trick from bacteria, scientists have created the first-personalized stem cells for patients that are free of the cancer-causing viruses and genes needed to make them.    The stem cells, derived from skin samples provided by five patients with Parkinson's disease, were first transformed into undecided state of cells in an early embryo.    They were used to make the dopamine-manufactured neurons that are lost to disease.    The technique removes a key barrier to using a special class of stem cells called an induced pluripotent stem cell, or iPS cell, to create replacement parts for patients that could be transplanted without any risk of rejection - the ultimate goal of regenerative medicine.
      The reprogramming of skin cells into iPS cells, which have the potential to become any type of cell in the body, is one of the hottest areas of biological research, without all the ethical drawbacks.    They also are ideal for making genetically matched tissues for patients, such as insulin-secreting islet cells for people with diabetes or brain tissue to treat stroke victims.
• 3/7/2009 Obama to end stem cell limits by AP.
      Washington - President Barack Obama is expected to sign an executive order reversing restrictions on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research.
• 4/14/2009 Cloudy to clear - Stem-cell thearpy holds promise for restoring corneas by Dan and Michele Hogan Science Daily.
      Stem cells collected from human corneas restore transparency and do not trigger a rejection response when inserted into eyes that are scarred and hazy, suggest experiments by rearchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.    It suggests that cell-based therapies might be an effective way to treat human corneal blindness and vision impairment due to scarring that occurs after infection, trauma and other common eye problems, said James L. Funderburgh, associate professor in the school's department of ophthalmology.    Their experiments indicate that after stem-cell treatment, mouse eyes that initially had corneal defects looked no different than mouse eyes that had never been damaged.    Funderburgh said they identified stem cells in a layer of the cornea called stroma, and found after many rounds of expansion in the lab, these cells continue to produce the biochemical components of the cornea.    One such component is the protein lumican, which plays a critical role in giving the cornea the correct structure to make it transplant.    It only took the mice 3 months to show improvement.    Their next step is use lab animals to test with.
• 4/15/2009 First cloned camel born in Dubai, scientist says by AP.
      Dubai, United Arab Emirates - A scientist says the world's first cloned camel has been produced in the desert emirate of Dubai.    Nisar Ahmad Wani, a senior reproductive biologist at the government's Camel Reproduction Center, said the cloned camel is a 6-day-old, one-humped female called Achievement or Injaz in Arabic.    The center said she was created from cells harvested from an ovary of an adult female camel.
• 4/18/2009 NIH sets guidelines for stem cell research by Lauren Neergaard, AP.
      Washington - When Obama eased limits on taxpayer-funded embryonic stem cell research, the big question became how far scientists could go.    The government answered: They must use cells culled from fertility clinic embryos that otherwise would be thrown away.    The National Intitutes of Health released draft guidelines that reflect rules with broad congressional support, excluding more controversial sources such as cells derived from embryos created just for experiments.
• 7/7/2009 U.S. issues rules for stem-cell research by AP.
      Washington - The government issued finals rules expanding tax-payer-funded research using embryonic stem cells, easing scientists' fears that some of the oldest batches might not qualify and promising a master list of all that do.    The final NIH rules settle a big question: Would new ethics requirements disqualify many of the stem cells created over the past decade, even the few funded under the Bush administration's tight limits?    The NIH came up with a compromise, saying it deems those old stem cell lines eligible for government research dollars if scientists can prove they met the spirit of the new ethics standards.    Further, NIH will create a registry of qualified stem cells so scientists don't have to quess if they're applying to use the right ones.
• 7/9/2009 Scientist: Sperm made from stem cells by AP.
      London - British scientist claimed to have created human sperm from embryonic stem cells for the first time, an accomplishment they say might someday help infertile men father children.    This could take 10 years before it is used per lead researcher Karim Nayernia, of Newcastle University whose team earlier produced baby mice from sperm derived in a similar way.    Some experts challenged the research, saying they were not convinced they had actually produced sperm cells, and if they did the sperm cells they created were clearly abnormal.    Which is true since what was created was a long way from being authentic sperm cells, but only showed all the characteristics of sperm.    Their research was only to plan to produce sperm to study the reasons behind infertility.
• 7/11/2009 Pope presses Obama on issues by AP.
      Vatican City - Pope Benedict XVI stressed the church's opposition to abortion and stem cell research in his first meeting with President Barack Obama, pressing the Vatican's case with the U.S. leader, who is already under fire on those issues from conservative Catholics and bishops back home.    The pope gave Obama a copy of a Vatican document on bioethics that hardened the church's opposition to using embryos for stem cell research, cloning and invitro fertilization.    Obama did pledge to seek to reduce abortions.
• 7/24/2009 New kind of stem cell passes hurdle by Seth Borenstein, AP.
      Washington - Two teams of Chinese scientists have made a major advance in mice in the development of a new kind of stem cell that doesn't involve destroying embryos.    Those cells are derived from ordinary skin cells, and when they were created two years ago from human skin and genetically reprogrammed, it was hailed as a breakthrough.    But questions remained whether they could act as chameleon-like as embryonic stem cells and morph into any cell type in the body.    One way to show that versatility is if the new reprogrammed stem cells could be used to produce an entire new life.    And now researchers have shown they can in mice.    For the first time, they were able to produce live mice from stem cells that were coaxed from skin tissue of adult mice and then reprogrammed.    And while there were abnormalities and unusal deaths with some of the first generation of mice, one team produced enough normal mice this way to create hundreds of second- and third-generation mice.     Studies on this type of stem cell, called iPS cells, demonstrated the practicality of using them, said Fanyi Zeng, associate director of the Shanghai Institute of Medical Genetics and co-author of the larger, more successful study, which appears in Nature.    The Chinese researchers had to then combine the new stem cell with cells that provide a placenta.
• 10/16/2009 Scientists grow mice heart muscle by Lauren Neergaard, AP.
      Washington - Scientists have grown a peice of heart muscle - and then watched it beat - by using stem cells from a mouse embryo, a big step toward one day repairing damage from heart attacks.    Until now, scientists haven't know how to coax them into producing pure cardiac muscle.    The new research, by Dr. Kenneth Chien and his team of Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital researchers, promises a more targeted approach.    The team discovered a master heart stem cell in both human and mouse embryos.    To control it they had to winnow out the daughter cell whose only job is to grow the muscle fibers of the ventricle, or pumping chamber.    Chein genetically engineered mice so that certain cells in the embryos' developing hearts would light either fluorescent red or green.    As he watched the embryos grow, where the colors overlapped signaled developing heart muscle.    When the team plucked out those cells, they were pure ventricle generators.    Next Harvard engineers pitched in with a special scaffolding, and then seeded the scaffolding with these ventricle stem cells, and a thin strip of mouse heart muscle grew right in the laboratory.
• 12/3/2009 Embryonic stem cells cleared by Rob Stein, The Washington Post.
      Washington - The Obama administration approved the first human embryonic stem cells for experiments by federally funded scientists under a new policy designed to expand government support dramatically for one of the most promising but also most contentious fields of bio-medical research.
      The National Institute of Health authorized 11 lines of cells produced by scientists at the Children's Hospital in Boston and two lines created by researchers at the Rockerfeller University in New York.    All were obtained from embryos left over by couples seeking treatment for infertility.
      This will empower the scientific community to explore the potential of embryonic stem cell research and start using millions of dollars in taxpayer money to study hundreds of lines of cells that had been put off-limits by George W. Bush, on moral grounds.
      The embryonic stem cell lines will still have to be created using private funding, federal funding will be permitted for experiments using a much larger array of lines.
      Scientists believe this will yield fundamental insights into the underlying causes of a host of diseases and could be used to cure diabetes, Parkinson's disease, paralysis and other ailments.
  
  The year 2010.
  
  
• 2/21/2010 Medical Innovations by AP.
  Help For Genetic Metabolic Disorder
      Bob Evanosky said he and his wife, Sonya were "handed three death sentences" in 2005, when all of their children were diagnosed with metachromatic leukodystrophy, a progressive and fatal genetic metabolic disorder that leads to muscle wasting, vison loss, paralysis and dementia.    But one of the Illinois couple's sons - 8-year-old John - has been offered hope through an experimental treatment pioneered by Dr. Suzanne Ildstad of the University of Louisville and Dr. Joanne Kurtzberg of Duke University (the other two did not qualify for the clinical trial).
      He received a modified, safer version of a bone-marrow transplant with father as donor similar to the one used to treat sickle cell disease.    Before the procedure he was a quadriplegic on a ventilator who could not speak.    The treatment was not expected to cure him but to improve his condition.    In time he had improvement in his disposition, breathing and some movement in his body, such as his arm and stretch, a little hope and optimism.
  Hand, Face And Similar Transplants
      For a person needing a new hand to replace one lost would face a lifetime of anti-rejection medications, but Ildstad and her team could someday eliminate the need for such potentially dangerous drugs.    With a $1.6 million grant from the DOD transplanting bone-marrow stem cells from the donor, along with a composite tissue transplant such as a hand transplant is designed to create a "twin" immune system that helps the body recognize the transplanted tissue as part of itself.    If it works it could revolutionize reconstructive surgery.
  Multiple Sclerosis And Other Disorders
      Researchers believe safer bone-marrow transplants could also treat relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis and host of other autoimmune disorders (Rheumatoid arthritis and lupus).    They are working on a less toxic bone-marrow transplant which does not require a perfect genetic match donor and may be performed on an outpatient basis.    One clinical trial treats MS through a transplant with stem cells and "facilitating cells," which help the donor cells to "take."
  
• 5/21/2010 Scientists' artificial DNA powers a cell by Lauran Neergaard, AP.
      Washington - Scientists announce a bold step in the enduring quest to create artificial life.    They've produced a living cell powered by manmade DNA.    While such work can invoke images of Frankenstein-like scientific tinkering, it also is exciting hopes that it could eventually lead to new fuels, better ways to clean polluted water, faster vaccine production and more.
      Is it really an artificial life form?
      The inventors call it the world's first synthetic cell, although this step is more a re-creation of existing life - changing one simple type of bacterium into another - than a built-from-scratch kind.
      But genome-mapping pioneer, J. Craig Venter, of Maryland, said his team's project pave the way for the ultimate, much harder goal: designing organism that work differently from the way nature intended for a wide range of uses.    Already he's working with ExxonMobil in hopes of turning algae into fuel.
      "This is the first self-replicating species we've had on the planet whose parent is a computer," Venter said a field of synthetic biology or biomolecular engineering of the highest order but has not crossed the line of creating new life from scratch.    What was discovered was partially synthetic because they stuck the manmade genetic code inside a living cell to form a related species, with its own cytoplasm.    Thus the synthetic part was "running on the hardware of the modern cell."    Venter founded Synthetic Genomics Inc, a private held company that funded the work, and his research institute has filed patents on it.
  
• 6/24/2010 Stem cells reverse some blindness by Alicia Chang, AP.
      Los Angeles - Dozens of people who were blinded or otherwise suffered severe eye damage when they were splashed with caustic chenicals had their sight restored with transplants of their own stem cells - a stunning success for the cell-therapy field, Italian researchers reported.    The treatment worked completely in 82 of 107 eyes and partially in 14 others, with benefits lasting up to a decade so far.    This was for people who suffered chemical burns on their cornea from heavy-duty cleansers, and not for damage ot the optic nerve or macular degeneration, which involves the retina.    Nor would it work for people who are completely blind in both eyes.
      The researchers took a small number of stem cells from a healthy eye, multiplied them in the lab and placed them into the burned eye, where they were able to grow corneal tissue to replace the damaged area.    Because the stem cells are from their own bodies, the patients do not need to take anti-rejection drugs.
  
• 6/27/2010 Strides reported in growing lungs in the lab by Rachel Bernstein, Los Angeles Times.
      Los Angeles - Breathe in, breathe out - it may seem simple, but lungs are devilishly complicated structures, boasting more than 40 cell types and an intricate network of blood vessels and air sacs.
      So engineering lungs in the lab has been extremely challenging.    Now two research groups have made major strides, with one of them has engineered a lung that can sustain a rat, and the other has created a lung-mimicking device for toxicology studies that acts more like a real lung than any earlier efforts.
      One report brings closer the day when artificial lungs might be grown for human transplants; the other offers a method for testing the effects of toxic chemicals on lungs that is cheaper and more humane than animal tests and more reliable than ones done in test tubes.
      A team led by Dr. Laura Niklason at Yale University grew rat lungs almost from scratch.    The group took lungs from adult rats and dissolved away all the cells, leaving behind a fibrous lung "skeleton."    They then seeded them with lung cells from newborn rats, then incubation in a "lung bioreactor" that mimicked the fetal lung environment, producing functional lungs.    They then implanted the lungs into four live rats and showed that the engineered lungs were 95 percent as efficient as natural ones.    Niklason predicts it will be 20 or 25 years before the technology can be used to build lungs for human transplants.
      The other group described how Dr. Don Ingber and his team at Harvard University created a "lung on a chip" - a tiny device that is remarkably effective at replicating the behavior of actual lung tissue.    Their immediate goal was to investigate the respiratory effects of tiny substances called nanoparticles as an alternative to animal and cell culture testing, with hopes of additional applications down the line.    Nanomaterials are used in a wide range of products, including ones as varied as food packaging, textiles and sun screen, a very under studied area as to health effects.
      The crucial element of lung tissue is the interface between the air sacs and blood vessels, so the team recreated this surface using a membrane covered with human lung cells.    The membrane was sandwiched between two peices of a rubber-like material, creating channels on both sides that could be filled with liquid to expose the cells to different environments and chemicals.
      The chip acted like proper lung tissue when exposed to blood flow and invading bacteria, fighting of the bug and transporting it to the other side of the membrane.    It also mimicked the stretching that occurs when lungs expand to take in air.    This property is missing in traditional toxicology studies using lung cells in dishes.
  
• 8/1/2010 FDA approves first stem-cell treatment on humans - Test will focus on spinal injuries by Steve Johnson, San Jose Mercury News.
      San Jose, Calif. - A Menlo Park biotech company says federal regulators will let it proceed with the world's first human test of a treatment made from embryonic stem cells for spinal cord injuries that had been placed on hold for nearly a year because of safety concerns.
      If the treatment from Geron works, it "would be revolutionary," said Dr. Richard Fessler, a neurological surgeon at Northwestern University, who will lead the study of a stem-cell treatment designed to be injected into patients with spinal injuries to restore their motor function.
      Geron has spent 15 years and more than $150 million to develop the treatment, and "getting it into a clinical trial, just by itself, is a big deal," added Fessler, who has no financial ties to the company.    The U.S. FDA held up the study after a few animals in the test had developed small cysts, but over time it was determined the cysts did not lead to any adverse consequences and changes were made to minimize the likelihood of cyst formation.    In studies several years ago, Geron reported that its spinal treatment had helped paralyzed rats walk.    The company's treatment involves turning embryonic cells into another type of cell, which helps nerve fibers replace myelin, a fatty insulating substance that often gets stripped away when spines are injured, inhibiting the body's ability to transmit sensory signals.
      Geron has said it has found no teratomas (growth of unwanted cells) among the vast numbers of animal it has tested with its treatment.    To be selected for the study, patients must have mid-back spinal cord injuries that leave them paralyzed below the site of their injuries, which must be one to two weeks old.
  
• 8/3/2010 Adult stem cells promising - More potential uses explored by Malcolm Ritter, AP.
      New York - A few months ago, Dr. Thomas Einhorn, chairman of orthopedic surgery at Boston University Medical Center, was treating a patient with a broken ankle that wouldn't heal, even with multiple surgeries.    So he sought help from the man's own body.    Eihorn drew bone marrow from the man's pelvic bone with a needle, condensed it to about four teaspoons of rich red liquid, and injected that into his ankle.    Four months later the ankle was healed, and he credited it to "adult" stem cells in the marrow injection, which he saw a published research from France.
• 9/1/2010 Government appeals order on stem-cell research funds by AP.
      Washington - The Obama administration has appealed a federal judge's order that undercuts federally funded embryonic stem cell research.    The Justice Department filed its appeal with the U.S. District Court in District of Clolumbia, wanting U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth to reconsider his restraining order who blocked government funding of embryonic research last week.    A lawsuit claims the government is violating a law that prohibits use of taxpayer dollars in work that destroys a viable embryo.
  
• 9/10/2010 Court allows stem-cell funding - NIH halts support for new research by Pete Yost, AP.
      Washington - A federal appeals court permitted federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research to proceed while it considers a judge's ruling that had temporarily shut off the money.
  
• 9/29/2010 Appeals court lifts stay on stem cell research by AP.
      Washington - A federal appeals courts permanently lifted an injunction that had barred the government from funding human embryonic stem cell research pending the outcome of a lawsuit challenging the Obama administration's new policies.
  
• 10/2/2010 U.S. apologizes for syphilis experiments - Guatemalans were infected in 1940s by Rob Stein, the Washington Post.
      Washington - The U.S. apologized to Guatemala for conducting experiments in the 1940s in which doctors infected soldiers, prisoners and mental patients with syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases.    The experiments, conducted by a physician who was later involved in the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study in Alabama, involved 696 men and women in studies to determine penicillin's effectiveness.    The study was clearly unethical as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Health and Human Services Secretary called Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom to inform him.    The country never even knew anything about the experiment until Clinton called to apoligize, which had been discovered while investigating the Tuskegee experiment.    The doctors had used protitutes with the disease to infect prisoners, and the results were never found.
  
• 11/16/2010 Stem cells helping restore sick hearts - U of L study shows promise by Laura Ungar, The Courier-Journal.
      A year and a half ago, Michael Jones' failing heart left him so weak he couldn't even climb stairs.    But after receiving an infusion of his own cardiac stem cells, the 67-year-old handles stairs with ease, works his land on his tractor, indulges in woodworking and plans to start jogging.    Study co-leader Dr. Roberto Bolli from U of L and others are using cardiac stem cells to heal hearts.
  
• 11/22/2010 Study involving embryonic stem cells approved by AP.
      New York - For only the second time, the U.S. government has approved a test in people of a treatment using embryonic stem cells - this time for a rare disease that causes serious vision loss.
      Advanced Cell Technology, based in Santa Monica, Calif., said the research should begin early next year, following the green light from the U.S. FDA.    ACT's experiment will focus on Stargardt disease, which affects only about 30,000 Americans.    But the company hopes the same approach will work for similar and more common eye disorders like age-related macular degeneration.
  
• 11/30/2010 Scientists trick cells into switching identities - Form of alchemy may heal humans by AP.
      New York - Scientists are reporting early success at transforming one kind of specialized cell into another, a feat of biological alchemy that doctors may someday perform inside a patient's body to restore health.    If a heart attack damages muscle tissue in the heart, they could get other heart cells to become muscle to help the heart pump.    This direct-conversion approach could be the future of so-called stem-cell biology says John Gearhart of the University of Pennsylvania.    Embryonic stem cells can be coaxed to become cells of all types, such as brain and blood.    In 2007 they got skin cells to revert to a state resembling embryonic stem cells, so that continued in the lab.
  
• 12/5/2010 Aging effects in mice reversed - Gene influences deterioration by Amina Khan, Los Angeles Times.
      Los Angeles - Have scientists finally discovered the genetic fountain of youth?    Hardly.    But by creating a genetic switch that allows them to artificially age - and rejuvenate - lab mice, scientists have shown that it is possible to reverse some effects of aging in mammals.    "It indicates there's a point of return if you remove the underlying cause of the aging," said Dr. Ronald DePinho, the molecular biologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute at Harvard Medical School who led the study.    Scientists know that some of the signs of aging in humans are associated with telomeres, repetitive strands of DNA that protect the ends of chromosomes.    (Chromosomes are the large bundles of DNA that contain our genetic blueprint.)    Telomeres "are like the caps on your shoelaces - they help maintain the package of your chromosomes."
      As cells divide and replicate, theses chromosome protectors get worn down and frayed over time.    And with age, as telomeres shorten, signs of age-related degeneration - from graying hair to infertility to organ failure - emerge.
      To figure out if this process could be reversed, the scientists first engineered mice that aged artificially fast.    In these rodents, the team had suppressed the gene that makes telomerase, an enzyme partly responsible for the repair of telomeres.
  With prematurely shortened telomeres, the mice's coats crayed, their spleens atrophed, and their brains and testes shrunk.    Their skin was plagued by dermatitis, and their sense of smell dulled.    In short, they showed many signs of aging.    At a normally youthful 6 months, they already looked 2 years old.
      The scientists then administered a drug that switched the suppressed telomerase gene back on.    Soon enough, the mice regained the sheen in their coats, sensitivity in their noses and the sperm in their testes.    The signs of age seemed to slough off them.
      They still have a lot of work to do on this research but it is a start.
  
  
  Return each year for updates beyond 2010.
  
  

This file created on March 15, 2006, updated on November 15, 2006, December 31, 2006, August 17, 2007, January 23, 2008, January 31, 2009, January 1, 2010, August 5, 2011, and October 8, 2011.