Assignment 16- Usha Adhikari

You have a fever of 101, your chest aches, and you can’t seem to get rid of that cough. You haven’t eaten all day but the thought of food makes you want to puke. You go to the doctors and they tell you have pneumonia. If this had been 100 years ago, you probably would have died. But it’s 2016 and antibiotics exist. You take the antibiotics for 6 days and life goes back to normal.

You may not realize this but modern medicine has made this possible, antibiotics were created around 100 years ago, and have saved countless lives. But here’s the thing, out of over a million different human reactions to stimuli, modern medicine can only “fix” about 250[1].  And Although antibiotics has done a lot, the problem is what they haven’t done, or more so, what they can’t do.  Antibiotics go into our bodies and kill bacteria and while this may help with certain things such as bronchitis, it won’t cure cancer.

The term cancer carries a lot of weight in our society. What it means to me maybe completely different from what it means to you. Most people have a personal connection to cancer, having lost someone close to it or knowing someone who has gone through pain of treating it. So far, most cancer treatments have been more of a “hit and miss” tactic with desperate attempts of cancer cell termination. But cancer impacts everyone differently and the severity of each type of cancer and each case differs, creating the need of personalized treatments. This is where stem cells come into play.  

Stem Cells are unlike the rest of the cells in the human body and are unspecialized. All cells in the human body contain a person’s DNA and genes. What makes a cell specialized is that it has certain genes “turned off”, and has a specific job to be carried out in the human body[2]. Stem cells are unspecialized cells with the ability to create specialized cells. Through differentiation[3], otherwise known as stem cell division, a stem cell divides into new cells, those of which either turn into more stem cells or specialized cells with specific jobs to carry out.

There are two main types of stem cells, embryonic and somatic. Somatic or adult stem cells are cells which are used to replenish the tissues in which they are found. For example, a skin stem cell would help to create new layers of skin after a wound. Stem cells can be extremely helpful, as demonstrated by bone marrow transplants. During a bone marrow transplant, not only are bone marrow cells transplanted, stem cells are also transplanted. These stem cells then help create new, healthier cells in the bone.

The difference between the two types of stem cells is that embryonic stem cells are pluripotent and can turn into any specialized cell, while Somatic stem cells are thought to be limited to creating specialized cells of the tissue in which they are found. Embryonic cells are easier to culture since adult stem cells are rare in mature tissue and thus isolation from the tissue is difficult.

Embryonic stem cells are derived from embryos, which causes a lot of controversy over stem cells. These cells however are not derived from eggs fertilized in a woman’s body, instead they are donated eggs that have been fertilized in an in verto-fertilziation clinic[4]. This issue has become less of a controversial topic with the discovery of induced pluripotent stem cells by Dr. Takahashi and Dr. Yamanaka in 2006. Shortened as iPSCs, these cells are genetically reprogrammed somatic cells that are forced to express genes and factors, which in turn allow them to keep the major defining features of embryonic stem cells. This means that research of embryonic stem cells maybe can occur without the use of actual embryos, reducing the controversy around stem cells.

Stem cells are the key to understanding the human body, they tell the story of how a human is formed from a single cell. Stem cells are also the key to understanding and curing diseases from a cellular level, hoping to work its way up to organ levels where one day we might be able to replace damaged organs with specialized, stem cell cultured organs[5]. Stem cells will open a whole new world of medicine and will redefine life as we know it. Maybe one day stem cells based remedies may be as commonly prescribed as antibiotics are today.

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[1] Mukherjee, Siddhartha. "Soon We Will Cure Diseases with a Cell, Not a Pill." Ted Talks. Vancouver. Mar. 2015. Lecture

[2] Stem Cells Revolutions. Dir. Amy Hardie. Prod. Amy Hardie, Chris Hird, and Clare Blackburn. Wellcome Trust, 2011. Film.

[3] PIORE, ADAM. "Stem Cells." Discover 37.6 (2016): 42-45. Academic Search Complete. Web. 1 July 2016.

[4] "Stem Cell Basics.” : Introduction [Stem Cell Information]. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 05 Mar. 2015. Web. 11 December 2016.

[5] Bakalar, Nicholas. "Bone Builder, New Jaws for Pigs." The New York Times 28 June 2016, New York ed.,Science sec.: D6. Print.