Amazing Discovery in Stem Cell Research

Posted on November 26, 2007
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Stem cell research has been a hot topic for scientists, politicians and the general public due to the health implications, the potential moral dilemma, general social concern and the controversial way in which such science could be conducted.

So what are stem cells? They are the master cells, which are capable of forming every type of the roughly 200 types of cells in our body. The characteristics of such cells apart from being able to “turn into” other cell types such as heart cells, brain cells, skin cells etc is the ability of these cells to self renew or become immortal. These cells are specifically termed embryonic stem cells, which differ from adult stem cells which have been found in several tissues and can only generate a limited number of cell types, in addition to being difficult to grow.

The potential of such cells would be there value in such diseases as Parkinson’s, heart disease and spinal-cord injury, that is, being able to generate new replacement cells specific to that tissue that have been lost to the disease. Where the problem and the controversy comes in, is that up until now stem cells could only be obtained from embryos created during in vitro fertilization (IVF)- (this is not considering umbilical cord stem cells, which do not have enough stem cells for health applications) these embryos would have been discarded in several instances with failed IVF. However, the question of where life begins, has reared it ugly head and has held up stem cell research. Opponents of stem cell research argue that embryos at any stage, is life and should not be tampered with. There are also religious undertones here that exacerbate the problem, in that we are tampering with creation. Lastly, techniques in stem cell research constitute cloning-taken to the extreme, the cloning of humans does not sit well with people for a whole host of reasons-pick your movie- cloning super-soldiers, or pick historically bad science-eugenics.

Patients are trapped in a political-health limbo while decisions are made in various countries for and against stem cell research. However, all of that could change with the great work put forth by several groups, at the forefront however, is Dr. Yamanaka out of Japan-Dr. Yamanaka’s group was not only able to generate stem cells from mouse embryos, but followed this work up by generating stem cells from human skin cells. This work was reproduced independently at the same time by Dr. Thomson out of Madison Wisconsin-both groups have published there findings in Cell and Science this year respectively.

This discovery avoids the whole embryo issue altogether, and could provide the benefits that stem cells hold without the political and social concerns.

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