She sells stem cells…

“Some time next year an embryo will be cloned from a human adult. It will be implanted in the uterus of a young woman selected with some care for her wide pelvis and robust health. A son will be born at the dawn of the third millennium. Neither angels nor news wires are likely to herald the birth. The father — an Asian plutocrat, South American kleptocrat or aging Western rock star — won’t be looking for publicity. He will be looking for everlasting life.” So declared a piece in Forbes magazine on 11 January. All this is due to a series of breathtaking advances, crowned this past year by the isolation of embryonic stem cells. “The key breakthroughs have already occurred,” the opinion piece declared, “all the rest now is detail.” This, the writer announced darkly, is the dawn of “bioatomic power.” Indeed, many journalists were breathless about the potential of stem cells. They can’t be cloned into new humans, but they can in theory be cultivated and cajoled to form tidy masses of cells of any type, seemingly limited only by the imagination of the people in white coats. Results flowed in fast and furiously. The first splashes came in November, when two teams — both funded by Geron Corporation — announced they had isolated stem cells from embryos and fetuses. “Isolating these cells has been a Holy Grail for developmental biologists for years,” declared USA Today, dusting off a metaphor as musty as the knights of Camelot. US News & World Report ushered in the news by noting, “these tiny bits of protoplasm are capable of developing into all 210 different kinds of tissue found in the human body, and they offer the hope of one day serving as a source of universal spare body parts, allowing doctors to treat a wide array of diseases more effectively.” The report says cell lines will soon be cooking away to provide tissue culture for testing new drugs. Curiously, almost nobody noted that the researchers have thus far not been able to culture distinct lines from a single cell, which a biologist would consider a fairly basic test to demonstrate that these cells are, indeed, the wondrous stem cells that will be able to deliver all things to all people. Skepticism, such as there was, was focused elsewhere.