Stem Cell Research
Stem cells are the new research breakthrough, there are arguments and debates over if stem cell research is an important treatment to use or if it is harmful to the people who are giving the stem cells and the receiver of the stem cells. This is an excellent idea because it could save lives of many people who have limited options. Different types of stem cells, adult or embryonic, can be used for many treatments. However the use of these are causing controversy. Despite the controversy, many diseases such as Parkinson, Cancer, Alzheimer’s and Diabetes have been treated with stem cells and had good results.
There are two main stem cell types, they are embryonic stem cells and or Adult stem cells, also known as somatic
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Stem cell research is sometimes known as bone marrow transplants, Stem cell transplant is a procedure that replaces the unhealthy blood-forming cells and replacing them with new healthy cells. The patients have to go through intense chemotherapy or radiation to kill their unhealthy stem cells. Adult blood stem cells are usually taken from donor’s bone marrow or from a person's circulating blood. Another way that they take stem cells harmlessly, is after a baby is born they take stem cells from the blood of the umbilical cord because, the blood for stem cells are rich after birth and can be tested in clinics to treat diseases of the blood and the immune system. In 2006, researchers made another breakthrough by identifying conditions that would allow some specialized adult cells to be “reprogrammed” genetically to assume a stem cell like state. (National Institute of Health, pg. …show more content…
Fitzpatrick in Neurology, "We’re extracting some cartoon version of the disease, and then treating it, so that the animal model becomes the focus of our research, not that actual human disease. And we learn more and more about the model, but not the disease." ( Safer medicines, Quote 2 page 1) Another quote from Senior Principal Scientist, Dr Sandra Engle was "The problem is that mice are never really man and they deal with the biology in life very differently than we do. For example, mice don’t get most of the neurological diseases that we are very interested in studying, like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and schizophrenia – these things were bred out of mice sixty million years ago when the split between mice and primates occurred. So this is the real challenge, is that if you really want to understand human biology, you need to really be working in human material and we failed to do that for a very long time." (Safer medicines, Quote 4 page