E-Letter responses to:

editorial: Irving L. Weissman and David Baltimore Disappearing Stem Cells, Disappearing Science Science 2001; 292: 601 [Summary]

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Published E-Letter responses:

Multipotentcy of Adult Stem cells

Stephen Bartelmez   (31 May 2001)

Multipotentcy of Adult Stem cells 31 May 2001
Stephen Bartelmez, Professor University of Washington Respond to this E-Letter: Re: Multipotentcy of Adult Stem cells	I see the application of human embryonic stem cells being perhaps optimal for tissue regeneration. This would represent one of the greatest advancements of human medicine. However, to make the remark "Unfortunately, most (but not all) published accounts suggesting adult stem cell pluripotency have not successfully established that one type can produce a cell of another tissue type" stands in contrast to the recent article entitled "Purified hematopoietic stem cells can differentiate to hepatocytes" (Lagasse et. al., 2000, Nature Medicine 6(11):1229-1234). I believe the elegant experiments reported in this paper demonstrate that on even a nearly clonal basis that human stem cells can and did produce hepatocytes. Given the senior author status of Weissman on this Nature Medicine paper and even given their disclaimer ("but not all"), I don't understand the point of the comment. The best pathway eventually may be to use adult human stem cells whenever possible and practical and use embryonic stem cells for regeneration of other tissue.