Nature Reports Stem Cells has an interesting blog post on a death during a stem cell trial against the fatal and rare condition Batten disease. An independent group monitoring the trial decided that the death was due to the disease, not the treatment, which involves implants of neural stem cells from foetuses — note that’s not embryonic stem cells, and not patient-matched stem cells, about which there is so much potential excitement these days (see

Human embryos cloned from adult cells). The trial will continue, and Nature Reports Stem Cells has some good background on that.