Fourteen years ago in Australia my friend was diagnosed with advanced multiple sclerosis. A distraught family member exclaimed, "We will fight this, no matter what the cost we will take her to the United States." In fourteen years time the same scenario here in the United States may lead to a family member exclaiming, "We will fight this no matter what the cost we will take her to China."

I have been contributing to medical research for over seventeen years, the last three of which in the United States. My early years were spent working in Universities in Australia. For as long as I can remember researchers from all around the world looked to institutions in the United States as places we aspired to work for. Generous funding complemented by a large competitive, even aggressive student population meant that if you were serious about developing your research the only place to be was in the United States. More than any other country the United States was where the medical technologies of the future would be developed. Finally I am here, with my background as a prolific researcher and grant writer. I am ready to stand on the shoulders of my American mentors and push the field of developmental biology closer and closer to treatment modalities for degenerative diseases. The mentors and legendary thinkers are here but what about that legendary support for research the United States was famous for? A recent breakthrough has made a lack of national support for emerging medical technologies critically urgent.

Developmental theory was turned upside-down in 1997 with the announcement of the birth of Dolly the sheep on the 5th of July 1996 at the Roslin Institute in Scotland. Until this breakthrough was widely disseminated scientists believed that once a cell had terminally differentiated - which is the state of ninety-nine percent of the cells in an adult's body its nucleus was incapable of re-programming. We were wrong.

Being wrong in this instance was one of the most exciting things to happen in a researcher's lifetime. The observation that an adult cell's nucleus could be re-programmed back to the earliest stages of cell development depending upon the cytoplasm that surrounded it, opened up avenues of investigation that were simply thought impossible. Particularly in the field of degenerative diseases and cancer research which may be characterized more by disappointments rather than breakthroughs. However, all big shifts in thinking from the status quo

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