Heart Valves Grown from Stem Cells

Progress is being made in stem cell research, but wait for the punchline:

A British research team led by the world's leading heart surgeon has grown part of a human heart from stem cells for the first time. If animal trials scheduled for later this year prove successful, replacement tissue could be used in transplants for the hundreds of thousands of people suffering from heart disease within three years.

Sir Magdi Yacoub, a professor of cardiac surgery at Imperial College London, has worked on ways to tackle the shortage of donated hearts for transplant for more than a decade. His team at the heart science centre at Harefield hospital have grown tissue that works in the same way as the valves in human hearts, a significant step towards the goal of growing whole replacement hearts from stem cells.

And the punchline, which isn't found until many paragraphs into the story:

By using chemical and physical nudges, the scientists first coaxed stem cells extracted from bone marrow to grow into heart valve cells.

These were adult stem cells, not embryonic. After all the hysteria during the last election about curing every disease known to many using embryonic stem cells (remember the Michael J. Fox "twitchy" ad?), the real progess in stem cells is coming from reseach on adult cells. To date, the embryonic variety have yielded a lot of political noise but no serious advancements.