Stem cell research seized headlines at the beginning of this century, promising to revolutionize medicine by healing illnesses such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, diabetes, spinal cord injury, and heart disease.
These are all illnesses of severe cell deterioration or injury—illnesses that are in principle curable by embryonic stem cells, which have the ability to build every single tissue in the human body. Hence, when these cells were first isolated and replicated in 1998, it struck scientists at the time that the door now lay wide open to the advance of regenerative medicine.