Before treatment, the 51-year-old graphic artist was legally blind, unable to read a single letter on a standard eye chart. She has suffered from Stargardt's disease, the most common form of macular degeneration in young patients, since she was a teenager, and it was getting progressively worse. A second patient, aged 78, suffered from dry macular degeneration - the leading cause of blindness in the elderly -and could not even see well enough to go shopping. But after being treated with stem cells from a donated human embryo, both women have improved dramatically. Their results are the first-ever report of the medical use of stem cells taken from human embryos, making them crucial barometers of whether the controversial technique will ever find widespread therapeutic uses.
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