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Surgeons have used stem cells from fat to help repair skull damage in a 7-year-old girl in Germany, in what's apparently the first time such fat-derived cells have been exploited to grow bone in a human. The girl had been injured two years before in a fall, which destroyed several areas of her skull totaling nearly 19 square inches, the German researchers reported. Other surgeons had failed to correct the defects, and the girl wore a protective helmet. Her brain could sometimes be seen pulsating through the missing areas of her skull. But several weeks after the stem-cell surgery, she...

They are the building blocks of flab, the wages of cheesecake, the bloated little sacks of grease that make more of us - more than we can fit into our pants. Scorned and despised, they are sucked out surgically by the billions from bulging backsides, bellies and thighs. But they are not without admirers. "Fat cells are beautiful cells to look at," said Dr. Philipp E. Scherer, an associate professor of cell biology and medicine at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. "I've been working with them for 10 years and I still enjoy looking at them." On...