A line of eager bookworms wound half way around the block at the intersection of Walton and Clark Streets on the Gold Coast, waiting to get their eyes (and hands) on items such as a $2,000 first edition of The Great Gatsby, a $1,000 signed first edition of Valley of the Dolls, and a $350 drawing by the French writer Jean Cocteau.

They call it “stem cell land.”

The two-room laboratory on the 13^th floor of Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine is about the size of a dorm room. It houses drawers full of slides and pipettes, a collection of microscopes and the progeny of four human embryonic stem cell lines.