[dekhn]

California legalized stem cell research ~20 years ago, https://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/23/us/california-law-permits... This led to CA being one of the world leaders (funny that a state can be a world leader, but that's CA in a nutshell) in stem cell research and applications.

I worked in a few labs that did stem cell work and we got really attached to some of them. Like, "here's a microbrain I've been growing for 3 months", you start to empathize with them a bit.