The 90s:

Researching While the Sun Shines

POLITICS: 1990

Conflict:

Britain had been struggling with issues much like the United States', assigning committee after committee to investigate how embryos could be used in research.

Compromise:

British Parliament passed the Human Fertilization and Embryology Act, which allows many types of research to be conducted on human embryos.

SCIENCE: 1992

A team of scientists led by Irving Weissman at Stanford University, the same team that isolated mouse blood cells in 1988, discovered a method to isolate human blood stem cells (hematopoetic cells).

SCIENCE: March 1998

Italian scientists discover that blood stem cells, when moved into muscle tissue, fit right in. They become muscle stem cells and can producer muscle tissue.

SCIENCE: November 6, 1998

Perhaps the most influential discovery of the 1990s was that of James Thomson and his team. Thomson had been working with his team with a batch of frozen human embryos donated by an IVF clinic (couples were given the option to donate their extra embryos to the research). First, the researchers placed the embryos in culture dishes and grew them for five days until they were blastocysts. The team then removed the inner cell masses of these tiny cellular spheres with hollow glass needles. They placed these insides in separate cultures, and through a process of trial and error gave them the right conditions to grow and aggregate into larger masses of cells.  This method is now, essentially, what scientists use today to work with hESCs. James Thomson stated that the findings and what followed:

" [...] should be useful in human developmental biology, drug discovery, and transplantation medicine"

POLITICS: 1999

Conflict:

Congress felt that the federal funding of stem cell research was too loose, and sought to limit federal funding of i.

Compromise:

Congress passed The Dickey Amendment, which states that the government will not fund research that destroys or creates embryos for the cause of research. It is later elaborated upon by President Bill Clinton.