Hidden Nook

"Cloning would mean creating new human life, new embryos, just for experimentation," Romney said in the 60-second radio ad paid for by his political committee. "If, like me, you support stem-cell research but you oppose cloning human embryos, please tell your legislator. Help me oppose the radical cloning bill now on Beacon Hill." [Source]

New nerve cells, glial cells, liver cells, heart cells, muscle cells – all were grown in a dish from stem cells from the human nose. Establishing the versatility of these adult stem cells was in itself a significant scientific achievement, but the Griffith University team's experiments also uncovered a raft of additional advantages.

For starters, such cells are easily harvested. The research team's doctor, prominent Brisbane ear, nose and throat specialist Chris Perry, was able to extract them from consenting patients – and later from the scientists themselves – by simply spraying the inside of the nose with a local anaesthetic and then removing a sample no bigger than a grain of pepper.

The harvested stem cells were not only readily available but proved to be astonishingly easy to grow in the laboratory, with millions of them forming within weeks. Down the track, once all the required trials are carried out – which could take at least another five years – it might well be possible for a healthy person to have his olfactory stem cells harvested, a mildly uncomfortable process that takes barely 10 minutes, grown in a lab and then frozen for injection years later into – to give just one example – the withered muscles of a heart after a heart attack.

For the moment, however, the most significant advantage is that these cells can be harvested from anyone of any age and without the need for major surgery, which is the only way scientists have been able to obtain other neural stem cells in the brain. And unlike adult stem cells in the blood and bone marrow, they are abundant and easily multiplied.