Nature Cell Biology 3, pp 778 - 784

Stem cells are precursor cells, with the potential to differentiate into neural tissue, muscle or skin, and can be transplanted the site of injury and used to regenerate the damaged tissue. Stem cells are currently the focus of active research and ethical debate, as they hold great promise for regeneration of damaged tissue such in neurodegenerative disease, in dystrophy which involves muscle degeneration or in the treatment of burns. The caveats are, first that the transplant are often rejected by patients, unless stem cells are generated from the patients themselves, and second that stem cells have so far not been readily accessible. Indeed, they are usually generated from the bone marrow or from embryonic tissue, which raises the immediate debate over whether it is acceptable to generate human embryos for the sole purpose of research or of treatment of another human being.

Freda Miller and her colleagues at McGill University in Quebec, Canada, now report in the September issue of Nature Cell Biology the isolation of stem cells that can generate neural tissue, muscle or fat cells from human skin. Stem cells could thus be generated easily from the patients themselves, avoiding both the technical problems of graft rejection and the ethical problems over the use of human embryos in clinic and research. Jonathan Slack discusses the medical implications of these findings in an accompanying News and Views article.