2007: Year of the Stem Cell

Dec. 26, 2007 -- It was the kind of breakthrough scientists had dreamed of for decades and its promise to help cure disease appears to be fast on the way to being realized.

Researchers in November announced they were able to turn the clock back on skin cells and transform them into stem cells, the mutable building blocks of organs and tissues.

Then just earlier this month a different team announced it had cured sickle cell anemia in mice using stem cells derived from adult mouse skin.

"This is truly the Holy Grail: To be able to take a few cells from a patient -- say a cheek swab or few skin cells -- and turn them into stem cells in the laboratory," said Robert Lanza, a stem cell pioneer at Advanced Cell Technology.

"This work represents a tremendous scientific milestone -- the biological equivalent of the Wright Brothers' first airplane," he said.

"It's bit like learning how to turn lead into gold."

Stem cells offer enormous potential for curing and treating disease because they can be transformed into any cell in the body and then hopefully used to replace damaged or diseased cells, tissues and organs.

But stem cell research has been highly controversial because -- until recently -- viable embryos had to be destroyed to extract the stem cells.

President George W. Bush has banned all federal funding for research on human embryonic stem cells, and access to stem cells in other countries has also been restricted because of the difficulty in finding women willing to donate their eggs.

The new technique, while far from perfected, is so promising that the man who managed to clone the world's first sheep, Dolly, is giving up his work cloning embryos to focus on studying stem cells derived from skin cells.

"The fact that (the) introduction of a small number of proteins into adult human cells could produce cells that are equivalent to embryo stem cells takes us into an entirely new era of stem cell biology," said Ian Wilmut, the Scottish researcher who first created a viable clone by transferring a cell nucleus into a new embryo.