LAST year, a team of scientists in California announced they had taken stem cells from the brains of rats and turned them into neurons in a Petri dish. It was good news: perhaps one day doctors would be able to do the same with people, extracting stem cells from the brain of, say, a Parkinson’s patient and making new neurons out of them to replenish the cells damaged in the patient’s brain.
Of course, the scientists were careful to stress that, were such a therapy to ever materialise, it would be years down the road. This was an animal study…
