Skip to Content
Uncategorized

Banking on Stem Cells

The world’s first embryonic-stem-cell bank has opened in Hertfordshire, England. Great Britain’s Medical Research Council and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council are funding the bank, which will store stem cells of all sorts–adult, fetal, and embryonic–to help make…

The world’s first embryonic-stem-cell bank has opened in Hertfordshire, England. Great Britain’s Medical Research Council and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council are funding the bank, which will store stem cells of all sorts–adult, fetal, and embryonic–to help make them available to researchers worldwide.

The bank’s first two “deposits” are embryonic stem cell lines created at King’s College London and the Centre for Life, a research facility in Newcastle upon Tyne. These cells, derived from embryos created during fertility treatments, have the ability to become any type of tissue in the human body; they hold the potential to cure diseases ranging from Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s to diabetes, as well as possibly reverse the paralysis suffered by victims of spinal cord injuries.

Although Britain has much more liberal policies governing stem cell research than does the U.S., the bank has nevertheless drawn the ire of anti-abortion activists. That’s unfortunate, since the could become a tremendous resource to researchers investigating all types of stem cells. In fact, it could be a boon to the field along the lines that GenBank, a repository of gene sequences, has been to geneticists. Also unfortunate is the fact that U.S. scientists supported by federal funds won’t be able to take advantage of the embryonic stem cells lines in the bank.

Keep Reading

Most Popular

The inside story of how ChatGPT was built from the people who made it

Exclusive conversations that take us behind the scenes of a cultural phenomenon.

How Rust went from a side project to the world’s most-loved programming language

For decades, coders wrote critical systems in C and C++. Now they turn to Rust.

Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong?

An approach that promised to democratize design may have done the opposite.

Sam Altman invested $180 million into a company trying to delay death

Can anti-aging breakthroughs add 10 healthy years to the human life span? The CEO of OpenAI is paying to find out.

Stay connected

Illustration by Rose Wong

Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review

Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.

Thank you for submitting your email!

Explore more newsletters

It looks like something went wrong.

We’re having trouble saving your preferences. Try refreshing this page and updating them one more time. If you continue to get this message, reach out to us at customer-service@technologyreview.com with a list of newsletters you’d like to receive.