There's always somebody who comes up with a story every so often about a little break through, however when bush got into power he slapped a lot of laws on the use of stem cells (embyonic in particular). And most stem cell research lies under cancer treatments and other life threatening diseases.
dr george cotsarelis pensylvania university - always seems to be looking into new ways of into stimulating the scalp stem cells into growing hair, 10 or so years with no real breakthough, but he always seems to find out things important in the understanding of it all though. He was also part of follica.
and there is a university in berlin who have claimed to have grown human hair follicles.
If you google hair multimplication you'll find some info on wikipedia and you can search on there.
I also found a good website a few months ago with lots of article concerning "big break-throughs" in treatments but have not been able to find it again.
