In 2001, Oliver Brüstle, a prominent German stem cell scientist, and Wolfgang Clement, then prime minister of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), caught a plane to Israel. The purpose of the trip was to pay a visit to stem cell pioneer Joseph Itskovitz-Eldor at the Technion Israel Institute of Technology, in Haifa. However, its significance goes far beyond the specifics of the exchange that occurred between two scientists and a politician. In retrospect, it can be seen as the moment when Germany's full participation in the field of stem cell research was underwritten.
In 2008, Hans Schöler, Director of the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Biomedicine, in Münster, shared the Robert Koch Prize with Irving Weissman and Shinya Yamanaka for their critical contributions to stem cell biology. Schöler was the first to derive germline cells from murine embryonic ...
