CELL*WISE

Today, Time Magazine published their "Top 10" lists for 2007. There are 50 lists total, in 5 different categories.
All of the ones in the Science category are very interesting, and you can quickly view all of the slides of the top 10 slideshows for subcategories "Scientific Discoveries" and "Medical Breakthroughs" by clicking the links that I have provided below.
Within these subcategories, I will briefly note only the numbered items that are relevant to this blog.
Here are the links:

"Top 10 Scientific Discoveries of 2007" Time Magazine
#1 are the most recent "induced pluripotent stem cell" (IPS cells) breakthroughs, in which two groups "reprogrammed" human skin cells into embryonic stem cell-like cells, in other words cells that are similar yet not identical to embryonic stem cells, without any use or destruction of human embryos. The "reprogramming" involved inserting four particular stem cell-associated genes using retroviral vectors. To read more about very recent news about this stem (IPS) cell research and about the IPS "reprogramming" protocol click here for a great summary post by The Daily Transcript blog. In addition to new scientific publications, he also links to today's NY Times Science Section article featuring Dr. Shinya Yamanaka, which I found very interesting, as well as the informative comments of Dr. Alex Palazzo himself from The Daily Transcript.
#2 is titled "Human Mapped" and it refers to the publication of the entire genome of J. Craig Venter, the first such genome ever published of a single person (publication link).
#5 is is titled "Building a Human Heart Valve" and is about a team of researchers led by Dr. Magdi Yacoub engineering functional human heart-valve tissue using bone marrow stem cells (also known as "mesenchymal stem cells" or "multipotent stromal cells").

"Top 10 Medical Breakthroughs of 2007" Time Magazine
#9 is titled "New Source for Stem Cells" and is about the discovery that the abundant amniotic fluid-derived stem (AFS) cells could have the potential to differentiate into almost any cell type. This was discovered and investigated by the research group led by Dr. Anthony Atala at the Wake Forest University Institute for Regenerative Medicine. Here is the Wake Forest University press release and the abstract of the published paper in Nature Biotechnology.

I don't have time to go into all the details and give much of my own opinion right now. I may possibly write a follow-up post.
For now, some quality links of the most popular stem cell news currently.

"From Mice to Men: Tracing the Skin Cell to Stem Cell Path" Wired Science from Wired.com
In this article, you can click on a link (the first November 2007 link in the "timeline") to actually get the full scientific paper (PDF) from the Yamanaka lab group (Japan) titled "Induction of Pluripotent Stem Cells from Adult Human Fibroblasts by Defined Factors" published in Cell. Even I'm still waiting on getting the full paper from the Thomson lab group (Wisconsin) titled "Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell Lines Derived from Human Somatic Cells" published just yesterday online in Science, because most people need a subscription of some sort.

Additional current articles from Wired.com:

"Why You Should Believe the Latest Stem Cells Breakthroughs"

"Skin Cell-to-Stem Cell Alchemy 'Like Turning Lead into Gold'"

Other current news articles:

"Embryonic Stem Cells without embryos - they're here" VentureBeat (Life Sciences category)

"Skin Cells Can Become Embryonic Stem Cells" from NPR (where you can listen to an 8-minute audio of the news if that's more convenient for you)

"New Method Equalizes Stem Cell Debate" from NY Times (if you're into more of the political
viewpoint / impact)

Fellow bloggers are starting to write...and there will be many many more:

"Middle Ground For Stem Cells?" from Hope for Pandora

"Induced Pluripotent Cells from Adult Skin" from Fresh Brainz

"The Next Stage in the Stem Cell Debate Begins!" from Framing Science

This may be the beginning of the end of the controversy, but it is still just the beginning for these scientific methods. As with most anything, there are advantages and disadvantages. It will probably still take many years for improvement and before any of these techniques can be used clinically. The important (hyphenated) keyword right now is "embryonic stem cell-like".