Embryonic or neural stem cells are key tools for future studies on Parkinson’s disease or other degenerative diseases. So far, the only way to obtain embryonic stem cells implied the destruction of an embryo.

He made sense of something Darwin was at pains to speculate about, but couldn’t quite argue persuasively.

For a neurodegenerative disease that strikes later in life with neuronal dysfunction and subsequent cell death by showing a mind-boggling heterogeneity of subtypes, spinocerebellar ataxia had not been adequately tackled for a long time.

Claudia Castillo’s brand new, tailor-made windpipe, which European scientists created last year by lining the cartilage of a donated trachea with her own stem cells, has been heralding a new “cells into organs” era.

Since his seminal 1994 discovery of the Pax-6 gene as the universal master switch of eye formation, Professor Walter Gehring had to prove his point by expressing the mouse gene on the wings and legs of the fruit fly.