"The work done by the MIT team paves the way to find new containment strategies" because it allows a better understanding of the patterns characterizing the initial stages of a disease outbreak, he said in a commenton the research.
Ms. Jackson, who isn't told which companies requested the research, declined to commenton the prior art she has found, citing confidentiality agreements.
But Josephine Quintavalle, director of Commenton Reproductive Ethics (Core), which opposes embryonic stem cell therapies, dismissed the research as "highly speculative".