2013: Year of the Stem Cell

Researchers have already safely injected stem cells into patients with neurodegenerative diseases and spinal cord injuries -- and they've seen the potential to vastly improve lives.

Knut Olstad in August 2011, 20 minutes before the accident that left him paralyzed below the waist

Marcus Hilton has probably been going blind since he was born, though he didn't really begin to notice that something was wrong until he was seven or eight. Several years after that, he was officially diagnosed with Stargardt disease, the leading cause of juvenile blindness. Thirty-four years of decline later, his retinas irreparably damaged, he is unable to drive, read fine print, or recognize people from a distance.

For Knut Olstad, devastation came much more suddenly. Having quit smoking and taken up cross-country skiing and bicycling in an early mid-life crisis, he was 45 years old and on what he described as the vacation of his life, conquering 25 mountains on the Tour de France route. On the last descent of the twenty-fifth mountain, on what might even have been the final turn of the entire trip, a car veered into his lane. He swerved out of the way, squeezed just a little too hard on the front brake ... the next thing he remembers is waking up, immobile, in a hospital where equipment beeped ominously through his morphine fog and everyone spoke a foreign language.

"I thought I was in a science fiction movie," he recalled over the phone from his home in Norway. And even as he's slowly been able to make sense of what happened to him, his life since then has, in a way, remained in the realm of the abnormal.

In 1998, when human embryonic stem cells were first isolated, we anticipated a "rush of medical advances," as The New York Times put it. That promise -- along with all of the ensuing controversy -- is still alive, has already become reality in select cases -- for example, with bone marrow transplantations -- and still has plans to live up to all of the expectations that have been set for it.

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2013: Year of the Stem Cell