Introduction

Ever since the birth of human therapy with cultured cells in the author's laboratory, he have been occupied with the field of cell therapy. Since that time, the subject has attracted the interest and participation of scientists in the United States, France, Italy, Sweden, the Netherlands, Japan and Korea. It also attracted the participation of industry. The author describes the early history of cell culture, the variety of cultured cell types used for therapy of different diseases, the large number of patients treated and the quality of the results obtained. He discusses embryonic stem cells and some of the problems that have to be solved before the somatic cells derived from them can be used for human therapy.