Before 1980:

Setting the Stage

SCIENCE 1953: Teratomas

 In 1953, a scientist named Dr. Leroy Stevens researching radiation's effect on mice found one of these tumors on a test mouse. By 1965, he had proved that the tumors were caused by rogue stem cells, which was some of the first evidence that stem cells could differentiate into many kinds of other cells.

"Teratomas grow into ghastly, irregularly shaped balls of tissue. Extremely well developed ones look something like the encapsulated remains of an airplane crash victim who has been run through a blender. They are full of bits and pieces of what would have been a body, replete [complete] with vestigial [leftover] pieces of limbs and strips of bone and ligament."

- Michael Bellomo, The Stem Cell Divide

"About the ugliest thing in medicine"

- Dr. William Harbut, Member of the President's Council on Bioethics

(Behind the Scenes:) Bioethics Movement

In the mid-1960s, there was a push to combine the humanities and sciences to answer "big questions", such as "What is it to be human?" This combination of philosophy and science later became known as bioethics, and the field now has an enormous influence on stem cell research and its funding.

SCIENCE 1964: Blood Cells

In 1964, Canadian scientists Andrew Becker, Ernest McCulloch and James E. were measuring radiation's effects on mice when they discovered that the failing blood system of a highly irradiated mouse could be repaired by a bone marrow infusion. They later announced that the same group of cells that replaced the bone marrow of the mouse now were established in a colony in the mouse's spleen, where they continued to produce blood cells. This proved many theories about stem cells:

"All of the concepts that they worked on in the 1960s - that you could quantify stem cells, that the definition of a stem cell was a cell that could

self-renew, give rise to more of itself and also give rise to differentiated progeny - all of that has stood the test of time."

- Dr. Alan Bernstein, President of Canadian Institutes of Health Research

Behind the Scenes: IVF Clinics

IVF clinics are designed to give infertile couples a chance to have a baby by beginning the baby's development outside the mother. This process does not work for every embryo so multiple embryos are formed. Many of these go unused and are destroyed In the early 1960s, the advent of In-Vitro Fertilization, clinics began to produce "extra" embryos, kick-starting the debate about whether these could be used for research.

POLITICS : July 12, 1974

Conflict...

...Was the Tuskegee Syphilis study, in which many African Americans were unknowingly given the disease and suffered the consequences, all the time being monitored.

Compromise...

...Was The National Research Act, otherwise known as Public Law 93-348, which introduced an ethical advisory board to the government and shut down government funding for research involving embryos, as said on page 353 of the Act:

LIMITATION ON RESEARCH

" Until the Commission has made its recommendations to

the Secretary pursuant to section 202(b), the Secretary may not conduct

or support research in the United States or abroad on a living

human fetus, before or after the induced abortion of such fetus, unless

such research is done for the purpose of assuring the survival of such fetus."