A Hierarchy of Stem Cells

[JBeukema]

Most junior scientists prefer to tell us what they know — not what they don’t know. That’s how they are likely to get media attention among their peers and establish their future reputations. But senior scientists and emeritus professors, on rare occasions, are willing to tell us, with humility, what we don’t know, because they have the maturity and self-confidence not to worry about making themselves looking foolish in the eyes of the press or their students. So here is something we don’t know — one of the important open questions in stem-cell biology, and an instance of the genotype-to-phenotype problem: which of two alternative models of stem-cell differentiation determines the architecture of complex creatures?

A Hierarchy of Stem Cells | h+ Magazine