The Price Of Stem Cells: Certain Life Or Certain Death
Man’s inspiration for the harnessing embryonic stem cells could be taken from nature where certain animals regenerate severed body parts. The closest human counterpart to that would be the idea that a person comes from just two cells. Cultivating embryonic stem cells would necessitate an ovum undergoing in vitro fertilization. Implying, the cells were taken from zygotes. This reignited the eternal ethical debate of when life starts as well as when a group of cells becomes a person. Even though the medical advancement embryonic stem cells have potential, it still remains an ethical dilemma. Since the promise stem cell therapy held was groundbreaking, alternate sources such as hematopoietic stem cells, and as the video presents, adipocytes have been discovered since then.
Stem cells are like back up cells in the sense that they can be differentiated them into any other kind of cell. A great analogy would be how an unsculpted marble slab (stem cell) can change form dependent on the sculptor (DNA). To date, the process of how these cells differentiate is still much undiscovered. Scientists have only gone as far as establishing the parameters for stem cell differentiation.
The idea behind stem cell therapy is to take a culture and inject it into a patient. The cells should then begin working based off of its programming. Because some injuries leave damage that the body cannot repair, such as those sustained from subcutaneous burns that produce contracture, keratinization, and destroyed neural connections, the stem cells should be able to fix the unrepairable. However, if the therapy calls for specificity such as a valvuloplasty, then the cells would have to be programmed into the corresponding tissue before insertion. The valvuloplasty would then require a culture of valvular endothelial cells. This is to say that a culture of stem cells is not a “cure all” kind of fix.
Stem cells’ programming must be altered so that it becomes usable. This is done through genetic manipulation. On the same note, cancer is arises from the same reason: genetic mutations wherein the cell has abnormal instructions. It seems scary if you are faced with a cure that will either fix you or kill you; that isn’t to say that the stem cells do not develop mutations later on because of its genetic alteration. The idea of stem cells’ seems very promising if the cancer factor would be ratified; if there was a scientific way to ensure that stem cells never become cancerous, then we will have developed methods for tissue regeneration as well as the preventative cure for cancer.
