A to Z Health Guide 2007

The scientific bulletin of the year may be the stem-cell breakthrough. But 2007 provided a whole alphabet of big medical news. TIME's A-to-Z guide reviews them

By Coco Masters, Alice Park, Carolyn Sayre, Tiffany Sharples, Alexandra Silver and Kate Stinchfield

Virgin Birth

HWANG WOO SUK / SEOUL NATIONAL UNIVERSITY
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Reproductive technologies still haven't achieved the miracle of virgin gestation: getting a human egg to develop into an embryo without help from a sperm. But eggs can be coaxed to divide and yield stem cells, as Boston researchers learned after studying the work of disgraced Korean scientist Hwang Woo Suk. Hwang, who thought he had created the first human embryonic stem cells through cloning, had actually grown the first stem cells from a dividing human egg, suggesting the technique might be developed further.

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