In the year 2007 an HIV-positive American citizen named Timothy Ray Brown, who resides in Berlin, Germany underwent a stem cell transplant after being diagnosed with a particularly nasty form of cancer called acude myeloid leukemia. AML is a sufficiently specific syndrome that there are a couple of good treatment protocols for it, among them a stem cell transplant to replace the malfunctioning cells in the patient's bone marrow which manufacture defective blood cells. Now, here's where it gets interesting: the donor of the stem cells had a very specific genetic mutation which results in cells of the individual's immune …

Well, kinda. Hopefully soon, but not quite yet.

A team of stem cell researchers at Maastricht University have worked out a way to culture porcine stem cells in vitro to grow edible meat. It's not bacon yet - it's not pork-like, either, but has a texture more akin to cooked scallop - but it's a start. The team hopes to perfect this method so that it could be used to produce edible meat with far less impact upon the Earth's biosphere. As things stand now slaughterhouses and the greenhouse gases produced by farming pigs are a topic of concern to environmentalists, to …

I realize that some of these stories are kind of old, but in my defense I work a lot.

Scientists at the Tokyo University of Science announced earlier this month that they had grown a replacement tooth for an adult lab mouse. While this doesn’t sound like much given that rodent teeth grow continually through the creature’s life, they accomplished this task by engineering mouse cells to grow teeth and transplanting them into the socket of an extracted tooth. The tooth grown was fully functional, and seemed to have all of the nerve connections, structural integrity, and usability …

Dr. Richard Carmona, who served as Surgeon General of the United States of America between 2002 and 2006 has gone public with some of the problems he had after his appointment by the Bush administration, and it looks like censorship, control, and politicking were the driving force behind a lot of policies and not medical research and science. Dr. Carmona went before a committee in the House of Representatives yesterday, and went on the record in stating that he was censored in many ways by the current regime, including the editing of his speeches by aides who were idealogically closer …