I was having trouble finding a good article about this; Yahoo! seems to have the best one so far, but the story isn’t highlighted on any of the major portals yet. This seems extremely odd to me, especially since Kerry made stem cell research a major focus of his campaign.
Clinical trials with embryonic stem cells are believed to be years away because of the risks and ethical problems involved in the production of embryos — regarded as living humans by some people — for scientific use.
Heh.
This particular successful therapy used umbilical cord stem cells, which means we could go to a donor system instead of creating children for the purpose of harvesting their stem cells. This is a Good Thing. And look at this:
Additionally, umbilical cord blood stem cells trigger little immune response in the recipient [while] embryonic stem cells have a tendency to form tumors when injected into animals or human beings.
This is really a win-win situation. I hope the process can be successfully repeated!