History of the Major Events of
Stem Cell Research and Development
Stem cell research has been progressing rapidly since the early 20th century.Research is still ongoing, and scientists hope that this research will bring rise to new treatments and possibilities in medicine. Technological advances, such as the improvement of the electron microscope, which is able to achieve magnification of up to 2,000,000x, have assisted these areas of scientific research. Our understanding of this extremely complicated project is constantly advancing, and scientists are getting closer and closer to bringing stem cells into therapeutic application. Latest news on stem cell research. |
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- 1908 - The term "stem cell" was proposed for scientific use by Alexander Maksimov.
- 1960s - Joseph Altman and Gopal Das present scientific evidence of adult neurogenesis (how neurones are made) by continuous stem cell activity in the brain.
- 1963 - McCulloch and Till show that there are stem cells in mouse bone marrow.
- 1968 - First successful bone marrow transplant.
- 1978 - Haematopoietic (blood forming) stem cells discovered in human umbilical cord blood.
- 1981 - Mouse embryonic stem cells derived from the inner cell mass of mice embryos.
- 1997 - Leukemia is shown to originate from a haematopoietic stem cell.
- 1997 - Dolly the Sheep was successfully cloned
- 1998 - The first human embryonic stem cell line is derived at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
- 1998 - John Gearhart extracted germ cells from fetal tissue.
- 2000s - Several reports of adult stem cell plasticity are published.
- 2001 - Scientists clone first early human embryos for the purpose of generating embryonic stem cells.
- 2005 - Researchers claim to have discovered a third category of stem cell derived from umbilical cord blood. The group claims these cells are able to differentiate into more types of tissue than adult stem cells.
- 2005 - Researchers are able to partially restore the ability of mice with paralyzed spines to walk through the injection of human neural stem cells.
- October 2006 - Scientists at Newcastle University create the first ever artificial liver cells using umbilical cord blood stem cells.
- January 2007 - Scientists report the discovery of a new type of stem cell in amniotic fluid which could potentially be used instead of embryonic stem cells.
- June 2007 - Scientist Shroukhrat Mitalipov reports the first successful creation of a primate stem cell line through somatic cell nuclear transfer.
- October 2007 - Mario Capecchi, Martin Evans and Oliver Smithies win the 2007 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for their work on embryonic stem cells from mice.
- November 2007 - Two similar papers released on induced pluripotent stem cells.
- January 2008- Development of human cloned blastocysts following somatic cell nuclear transfer.
- March 2008- The first published study of successful cartilage regeneration in the human knee using stem cells.
- October 2008 - stem cells found in human hair.
- March 2009 - Andras Nagy, Keisuke Kaji, discover a way to produce embryonic-like stem cells from normal adult cells by inserting genes into cells and reprogramming them into stem cells without the risk of using a virus to make them change.
- 28 May 2009 - Researchers announced that they had devised a way to manipulate skin cells to create patient specific "induced pluripotent stem cells", claiming it to be the 'ultimate stem cell solution'.
- 11 October 2010 - First trial of embryonic stem cells in humans.
Research is ongoing and is not complete, so the science of stem cells is still in progression.