It revealed that healthy brain stem cells displayed a certain telltale protein called CD133 on their surface.
He then took brain stem cells from another rat and grew part of the spinal cord on a polymer scaffold.
Working on mice, they showed that DISC1 was active, both in cells taken from embryos and in brain stem cells taken from adult mice.
Researchers at several other labs found evidence of brain cancer stem cells at about the same time.
In that study, the connections between the hairs and the brain were broken and stem cells were used to create new nerves.
However, on closer examination, the new cells proliferating in the petri dish contained the florescent marker from the brain cells and the DNA from the embryonic stem cells.
In fact, other researchers have already managed to persuade adult bone marrow stem cells to develop into brain neurons.
However, he said that embryonic stem cells remained the most obvious source of cells for such transplants, as foetal tissue - used in some experiments - was scarce, and so-called "adult stem cells" had never been converted into the right type of brain cells, despite 15 years of research.
Its goal is to create pills that unlock the potential of stem cells already situated inside the brain, skin, and bone marrow.
Colombian neuroscientist Ricardo Dolmetsch, on leave from Stanford, heads up another challenge: using stem cells to figure out what the brain is made of.
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Sure enough, he found that the only cells that could produce new tumors in the test tube were the ones with CD133--strong circumstantial evidence that defective stem cells were the growth factor in brain cancer.
The next step was to transform the stem cells into immature versions of cells in the brain that produce myelin.
This chemical cascade, called the Wnt pathway, is turned on when organisms are injured, and it could in theory be used to make stem cells that are already present in the heart, brain and other organs regenerate damaged tissue.
Northwestern University School of Medicine Researchers Christopher Bissonnette and Jack Kessler converted stem cells (general cells in the bone marrow) into brain cells that can be used to replace damaged neurons.
It used to be thought that neural stem cells--which divide to produce nerve cells in an embryonic brain--shut down in adulthood.
He has found that stem cells, harvested from the brains of normal rats and injected into those suffering from brain cancer, will home in on gliomas within days of their introduction.
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