Claudio Bordignon, the 75-year-old scientist who conducted the first experiment on blood stem cells, has died. It occurred in 1992 at the San Raffaele Hospital in Milan, Italy. That year, Bordignon's world-first breakthrough was published in Nature number 356. The Italian scientist had vast experience in the United States and had become an entrepreneur in his own field. The Italian strategy, as Nature remarked, was "competing" with the American strategy of Michael Blaese and French Anderson. “Italians first to use stem cells", the scientific journal headlined.In order to comprehend the significance of his work, it is important to recall that Craig Venter achieved the sequencing of the human genome in 2000, concurrently with a European initiative. Many of the gene therapies that are currently transforming the field of medicine have their roots in Bordignon's initial experiment.