Stem cell research has been a hot political topic thats been on everyone's minds in last decade. Scientific breakthroughs have shown their potential to cure many diseases and lead to safer antibiotics and medicines. However, there is controversy surrounding the ethics of destroying human embryos to research them. In this part of my essay I will cover what a stem cell is, the different types of stem cells as well as how stem cells divide to form every cell in a persons body.
Undifferentiated cells are the primary type of stem cells. They can divide to create an organism and all of its respective cells. The undifferentiated cell can turn off some of its genes when it divides, making it specific to a job such as a blood cell or liver cell. Once it specializes to a specific job it becomes a differentiated cell. This occurs many times during an organism's development, making specialized cells that are more and more specific to a job, from the simplest of muscle cells to the most complex of brain cells. Once an undifferentiated cell becomes a basic type of blood cell, it cannot become a different type of
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They have already been used to help patients with illnesses and heal wounds. Doctors have been using stem cells in skin grafts since the seventies to heal victims of severe burns, although the new skin has no hair follicles or sweat glands. Stem cell blood transplants have been used to treat problems with a patients blood or immune system or to rehabilitate the blood system after a patient is treated for specific cancers. Although it is not a yet a certified procedure, scientists have successfully repaired the tissues of major body organs such as lungs, livers and hearts. This allows scientists to treat people suffering from lung cancer to skip the waiting line for a lung transplant and for sufferers of cirrhosis of the liver to skip the liver waiting line, which has an organ donor waiting line of about