Salary
Average Salary: $76,000
Expected Lifetime Earnings: $3,172,848
While there's no cut-and-dried answer to the salary question, as a stem cell biologist you'll make something between the Starbucks barista who serves you your monthly "splurge" (a vanilla soy latte) and the oncologist who treats people with the diseases you research.
There are no census-backed statistics on how much a biologist specializing in stem cell research makes. Medical scientists, the broad umbrella under which a stem cell biologist would seek shelter from the rain, make, on average, $76,000 per year (source).
As a stem cell researcher, you'll probably be working in a university-affiliated lab...and be on the university's payroll (source). Despite that fancy Ph.D. (and the less exciting, but also very real, debt load), you might still end up working eighty hours a week for only $40,000 per year as a research assistant (source). The money will get better once you're a fully-fledged researcher, but first you'll have to survive being a research assistant.
There are some ways to squeeze a little more money out of this job. You can finagle your way into a medical or pharmaceutical corporation, which often means a much better salary. Stem cell researchers hired by private firms can average $110,000 per year (source).
You can also bump up your salary a bit by better researching the best places to do your research. In Maryland, for example, researchers make an average $77,000 per year. On the other hand, those poor suckers in the Big Apple make a reported $41,000-$42,000 per year. In New York, that means eating a lot of ramen noodles.