History of Stem Cells
1868 — The term “stem cell” appears in scientific literature, when German biologist Ernst Haeckel uses the phrase stem cell to describe the fertilized egg that becomes an organism, and also to describe the single-celled organism that acted as the ancestor cell to all living things in history.
Nov. 6, 1998 — A team at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, led by James Thomson and Jeffrey Jones, reports the creation of the first batch of human embryonic stem cells, which they derived from early embryos. After finding the cells were pluripotent, the team sees the potential the cells have for drug discovery and transplantation medicine.
1997 — Dominique Bonnet and John Dick of Canada discover that leukemia comes from the same stem cells that make our blood cells. This is one of the first major studies to say that cancer grows out of stem cells gone off course, supporting the concept of “cancer stem cells.”
1981 — Two scientists, Martin Evans of the University of Cambridge and Gail Martin of the University of California, San Francisco, conduct separate studies and derive pluripotent stem cells from the embryos of mice. These early cells are the first embryonic stem cells ever to be isolated.
February 2, 1963 — Canadian scientists Ernest McCulloch and James Till perform experiments on the bone marrow of mice and observe that different blood cells come from a special class of cells. This is one of the first pieces of evidence of blood stem cells.
1953 — Leroy Stevens, a Maine scientist performing cancer research in mice, finds large tumors in their scrotums. These tumors, known as teratomas, contained mixtures of differentiated and undifferentiated cells, including hair, bone, intestinal and blood tissue. Researchers concluded the cells were pluripotent, meaning they can differentiate into any cell found in a fully grown animal.
June 1, 1909 — Russian academic Alexander Maximow lectures at the Berlin Hematological Society on a theory that all blood cells come from the same ancestor cell. This introduces the idea of blood stem cells that are multi-potent, or have the ability to differentiate into several types of cells.
1957 — E. Donnall Thomas, a physician-scientist working in Seattle, attempts the first human bone marrow transplantation. (He later wins the Nobel Prize for this work in 1990).
April 22, 2014 — Masayo Takahashi at the same Riken centre is due to select patients for what promises to be the world's first trial of a therapy based on induced pluripotent stem cells, to treat a form of age-related blindness.
Aug. 9, 2001 — President George W. Bush signs an order authorizing the use of federal funds for research on a limited number of existing human embryonic stem cell lines. Scientists fear several of these available lines are now too old for research.
1989 — Research from scientists Mario Capecchi, Martin Evans and Oliver Smithies comes together, creating the first “knockout mice,” which are mice specially bred in the laboratory to be missing specific genes. These mice are created using embryonic stem cells and homologous recombination, a process in which similar strands of DNA switch genes. Since scientists bred the first knockout mice, there have been more than 500 different mouse models of human disease. In 2007, the Nobel Assembly recognized these three scientists for their research, which has proven to be invaluable in understanding how various human diseases, including diabetes and cancer, develop.
1968 — Robert A. Good of the University of Minnesota performs the first successful bone marrow transplant on a child patient suffering from an immune deficiency that killed others in his family. The boy received bone marrow from his sister, and he grew into healthy adulthood.
April 5, 2002 — A Whitehead Institute team that includes future Children’s Hospital Boston stem cell researcher George Q. Daley, MD PhD reports combining the use of gene and cell-based therapy to treat a mouse model of immune deficiency.
