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Ronald McKay, a stem-cell researcher at the National Institutes of Health, who rashly said a few years ago that stem cells could be made to "jump through hoops," did claim to have generated insulin- producing cells from embryonic mouse cells. That became a page-one story for the New York Times in 2001. It "seems to be the first time that a miniature organ has been coaxed to form from embryonic stem cells," Nicholas Wade wrote. But within a year Douglas Melton of Harvard had shown that the claim was wrong. In doing their experiments, McKay and others had used insulin as a growth factor, and concluded that the insulin they detected had come from newly generated islet cells. In fact it had been there all along.

There followed in 2005 the fraudulent claims of the South Korean researcher Wu Suk Hwang, who claimed that he had created stem cells from cloned embryos. In this technique, a prospective patient's cell is put into an egg from which the nucleus has been removed. By this method, Hwang claimed, he had made stem-cell lines in one out of every twelve tries. The advantage of this method is that the resulting cells would match the DNA of the patient, and this (perhaps) would mean that the resulting differentiated cells, if they were ever obtained, would not be recognized and rejected by the patient's immune system. But the results were all faked anyway. That the head of an expensively equipped, government-supported lab would resort to such desperate measures shows how difficult genetic engineering has turned out to be.

IN SHORT, YES, STEM CELLS do have the potential to turn into more specialized cells (that is what we mean by a stem cell). But after eight years of trial and error, scientists have not yet shown that they know how to nudge or coax or direct any given cell in a desired direction -- for example, into the dopamine producing cells that are needed to combat Parkinson's disease.

In extenuation, it is said that not only has U.S. research been restricted, but that it is too early to expect results. Perhaps so. But around the world, thousands of scientists are working full time on this problem. Stem-cell research with full government cooperation is underway in at least seven countries: Britain, Israel, Singapore, and China among them. In the U.S., privately funded research has expanded rapidly. Harvard University has embarked on such a project, as have other institutions, for whom the U.S. restrictions have created a fund-raising opportunity.

Before too long, the general public will begin to suspect that something is amiss, and here is what I believe it is.

How do the cells of the normally growing fetus "know" how to develop into the specialized cells of a functioning body? For decades this has been the great unanswered question of embryology. It remains unanswered to this day. Stem-cell scientists would have done us all a favor by admitting this eight years ago. But modern scientists hate to admit to ignorance in their own field because it seems so unprofessional.

One answer, however, is that cells "know" what to do, and what to become, by coming into contact with adjacent cells. In fact, the body should be thought of as a society of cells that "learn" from one another. It is like a highly successful school, in which billions of pupils learn from each other how to specialize into hundreds of different trades. The stem-cell scientist is the optimist who believes he can isolate a single infant from this school and, by private tutoring and coaxing, propel it along a particular path of specialization. This, it seems to me, is the great error underlying the therapeutic theory of stem cells. Scientists don't know how the body's "school" works, and yet they imagine they can replicate its results in the isolation of the lab. To date, the only realistic method at their disposal has been trial and error.

Notice that this precisely reverses the great "engineering" error of the 20th century. "Social engineers" believed that nature was malleable and that education could reshape it. Human nature turned out to be hard to manipulate, however, and the great socialist experiment failed for that reason. Today's genetic engineers believe the opposite. Nature -- the genome -- is everything and each cell is centrally directed by some genetic program that we don't understand yet. In the simplified model that biologists have worked with, most things worth knowing about the cell are located in the nucleus -- in the DNA. Francis Crick did us no favor in claiming that in explaining DNA, he was explaining life. That was hubris, pure and simple. Life is far more complicated than DNA

The idea that the cells of the growing body "learn" by coming into contact with one another is something that scientists would prefer not to think about. It means that understanding the cell will turn out to be a hundred times more difficult than it already is. Another consequence is that the stem-cell dream might have to be postponed indefinitely. A recent New York Times article, headlined "Some Scientists See Shift in Stem Cell Hopes," hinted at this. Many "no longer see cell therapy as the first goal of the research," but envisage "a longer-term program," Nicholas Wade wrote. He added that "work since 2001 has produced no significant advance."

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