CGS-authored
James A. Byrne sits in a waiting room at the Stanford Fertility & Reproductive Medicine Center with an incubator next to him. At about 4 p.m., an embryologist hands Mr. Byrne three tubes, each containing a single egg freshly harvested from a young woman's ovaries.
These particular eggs are too immature for the in vitro fertilization procedure, but Mr. Byrne thinks they may help his experiments. He places them in the incubator, rushes to his black Honda Civic, and plugs the incubator into the cigarette lighter. Then he speeds away.
Mr. Byrne, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University's Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, studies stem cells. Like hundreds of other researchers worldwide, his ultimate goal is to use cloning to develop embryonic stem cells that are genetically matched to patients. In theory, these cells could enable scientists to grow any of the body's 200 or so cell types and replace a patient's diseased or damaged tissue without the threat of immune rejection. But these much-hyped therapies remain distant goals because the raw materials needed to develop such...
These particular eggs are too immature for the in vitro fertilization procedure, but Mr. Byrne thinks they may help his experiments. He places them in the incubator, rushes to his black Honda Civic, and plugs the incubator into the cigarette lighter. Then he speeds away.
Mr. Byrne, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University's Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine, studies stem cells. Like hundreds of other researchers worldwide, his ultimate goal is to use cloning to develop embryonic stem cells that are genetically matched to patients. In theory, these cells could enable scientists to grow any of the body's 200 or so cell types and replace a patient's diseased or damaged tissue without the threat of immune rejection. But these much-hyped therapies remain distant goals because the raw materials needed to develop such...