Stem Cells and Stem Cell Research

Starting in the latter part of the 20^th century, there's been a lot of controversy about stem cells and stem cell research. But, what exactly are stem cells? How are they used? Where do they come from and, lastly, why the controversy? I'm going to attempt to answer these questions, as well as leaving you with a few of your own.

The subject of stem cells became public after the late actor Christopher Reeve suffered a devastating spinal cord injury after a horse-riding accident in 1995. In the years following his accident, Superman (the role he is best known for) became a strong advocate for researching alternate treatments for people like himself that could provide more hope and more progress than what had been possible before.

Stem cells have the unique ability of being able to 'become' other types of cells. They've already been used for decades in terms of bone marrow transplants to replace the white blood cells destroyed during cancer treatments, but researchers in recent years have been exploring the possibilities of using these cells to repair or replace tissue that has been damaged due to an illness or accident such as Mr. Reeves'. When it comes to illnesses such as Parkinson's disease that involve a deterioration of cells over time, stem cells could in theory be used to replace the lost cells and slow or reverse the effects of the disease. If this were to come to fruition and doctors were able to use stem cells to regenerate damaged tissue, the effects on medical science would be enormous. It's not without downsides, though; depending on where the cells come from, they may have a limited number of 'uses'. Even so, it's more than what we have now.

In addition to bone marrow, stem cells have been taken from amniotic fluid, placenta and umbilical cord blood and human embryos. That last one is where the controversy lies.

The idea is that, since an embryo at early stages hasn't begun to form any 'specialized' cells, the cells extracted from said embryo have a much wider range of uses than cells from, say, an adult. This extraction process kills the embryo, which many pro-life advocates believe has already become a person. If someone kills an embryo...well, I'll leave it to you to complete that sentence. The 'other side', however, argues that fertility clinics also 'kill' a lot of embryos when they either deep-freeze them or simply don't use them. They say that, if the embryos are going to die anyway, they might as well be 'put to good use'. The Bush administration (US) held the first view, which is why all federal funding of embryonic stem cell research was cut off. Researchers in Scotland and Canada have been researching a way to modify skin cells into what are called Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells-stem cells that have the same range of usage as embryonic stem cells, but without the ethical issues.

So much still remains to be seen, but hopefully doctors will be able to treat people with a variety of conditions in ways they weren't able to before. To learn more about the subject, visit http://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/features/stem-cells-faq-questions-answers.