Search Results for: stem cell person of the year

Recommended reads: Dux, 3D printed ear brings Vacanti mouse to mind, AMD, more

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Vacanti Mouse

Eight years ago two new Nature papers broke on the scene reporting supposed STAP cells with one of the senior authors, Charles Vacanti of Harvard, most well known previously for making the so-called “Vacanti mouse” along with his brother Joseph. The Vacanti mouse had a bioengineered human ear growing on its back. While STAP cells […]

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Stronger link between EBV and MS brings concrete clinical hope

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Axial MRI scans of a person with multiple sclerosis

I’ve ended up learning a lot about multiple sclerosis (MS) while writing The Niche for the past twelve plus years, but I’ve never seen anything like the new research linking EBV and MS. EBV stands for Epstein Barr Virus. The reason I’ve learned much more about MS while writing here is that there has been

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Recommended reads: a tale of human tails, heart reprogramming, pericytes, microglia

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humans with tails

A piece on human tails and how we lost them caught my eye so I’ll start my weekly reads with that. This week I had the fewest Zoom meetings in ages, which allowed me to get more work done in my own lab and more reading. How about that? I even had some in-person meetings

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Human cloning is more likely now but would you take the big risks?

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human cloning

I’ve been following the research related to human cloning now for more than a decade. Is human cloning more possible at this point? How do we even define such cloning? Did you know there are two types? The goal of this post is to educate you and in the process answer such questions. What’s in

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What is Wharton’s jelly & its possible clinical uses?

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Wharton's jelly umbilical cord H&E

For more than a year in my first job as a scientist I isolated cells from umbilical cord veins and then tossed the tissue away, never realizing there was more there that could be useful in the form of something called Wharton’s jelly. What’s in this article Umbilical cord histology & Wharton’s jelly | What

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Risks rise as ISSCR drops strict 14-day rule on human embryo growth in the lab

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mouse embryos grown outside the lab

Something called the 14-day rule on growing human embryos in the lab helped keep a tough question in check for a long time: when is it ethically wrong or just practically unwise to continue growing a human embryo for research? There is no good answer based on science or anything else. ISSCR moves beyond strict

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Ukraine clinic plans to sell CRISPR enhancements: hair color, skin, & breast size

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medeus clinic crispr enhancements

It was a couple of years back that researcher He Jiankui claimed he made three “CRISPR babies.” No one would think about doing any kind of rogue gene-editing again, right? Not even somatic gene edits. After all, as far as we know he’s in jail. We still don’t know the health risks that these three

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