ABSTRACT

Canada has an exceptional history of advancing the –eld of stem cell research. In fact, a strong case can be made that it all started here in 1961 when Drs. James Till and Ernest McCulloch, a physicist and a hematologist at the Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto, were the –rst in the world to identify and characterize stem cells. Over the next few years, they published a series of seminal papers (Becker et al. 1963) that de–ned the lexicon of stem cell research still in use 50 years later. It is an achievement for which they were recognized with the Lasker Prize in 2005.