Banking on the future

Banking on the future

: "Optimists such as David Harris, professor of immunology at University of Arizona and chief scientific officer at one of the nation's largest private cord-blood banks, Cord Blood Registry of San Bruno, Calif., believe adult stem cells will be widely used in the next three to five years to heal burns, skin ulcers and bone fractures that don't mend on their own.

The predictions of others are more tempered. Scientists at the forefront of the work acknowledge they have taken only the first steps down a long road toward the goal of regenerative medicine. Growing tissue from stem cells outside the human body is a challenge at which scientists have had virtually no successes, Wagner says. And even efforts to show that adult stem cells can generate a variety of different tissues have fallen short, says Stanford University's Dr. Irving Weissman, whose success at isolating the adult stem cells in blood gave birth to the field in the late 1980s."

This quote lays out the state of the art in stem cell research. It also refers to Dr. Weissman, an important researcher I had missed.