Keeping Stem Cells Totipotent

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Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty profiles the work of researcher Petr Dvorak in the Czech Republic: "Dvorak was excited as he explained his laboratory's latest discovery -- a possible mechanism to keep human [embryonic] stem cells in their original 'blank' [totipotent] state. The leading international scientific journal in the field, 'Stem Cells,' is about to publish a paper detailing the findings. ... Embryonic stem cells do a couple of things. One, they will differentiate into all sort of cell types, and that's what excites everyone, because we can turn them, hopefully, in the long run, into cells that can be used for therapeutic purposes. But the problem is they do that when they feel like it, and we need to be able to control that."

Link: http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2005/4/61E9E32F-9251-43A5-B179-C1B52C1C166B.html