In this book, Professor John Rasko, a leading physician-scientist, and writer-historian Carl Power take us on a wild historical tour of this scandal-prone field of stem-cell medicine. They expose all the dirty little secrets that the hype merchants prefer to ignore—the blunders and setbacks, confusions and delusions, tricks and lies. It's a history rife with colourful characters. You'll meet Alexis Carroll, who discovered how to cultivate cells in a test tube: he opened the field of modern cell science with an experiment so bogus it blocked the way forward for the next 50 years. You'll meet Don Thomas, who developed bone marrow transplantation—the first successful stem-cell therapy—but only after a miserable decade in which all of his patients died. Alongside true stem-cell pioneers, you'll meet charlatans who cooked their data and claimed fake cures—sometimes with fatal consequences. Is there any good news? Which of the many promises of stem-cell research have been kept? And what of the future? Rasko and Power insist that we can only know where we're going if we have a sense of where we've been. Their study tears down the hype surrounding stem cells in order to reveal what's still worth barracking for.