Wee Kev's Blog

I got into a conversation a couple days about cancer and how a cure might not be too far off in the future.  Obama said in one of his campaign speeches that he wanted to cure cancer.  Which everyone says is ridiculous as he obviously can’t cure cancer.  However, what he can do is divert money from our ridiculously oversized military into researching something that actually has the potential to help our tax payers.  I don’t want this to go into some boring political diatribe, so I’ll get to the point….
Stem cell research looks to be the future of medicine, and it’s WAY WAY interesting.  I didn’t fully understand what stem cells were, just that they came from fetuses, and they’re at the center of a huge amount of debate.  Basically stem cells have the potential to transform into any cell in the human body. They’re the cells that a fetus starts with that grow to become our complex body structure. Our bodies are made up of around 230 different types of cells, brain, liver, muscle, blood, etc… And a stem cell has the potential to become any of those, it just has to be pointed in the right direction.  It’s like having a new kind of JB weld that you can pour onto any part of the car and it’ll just rebuild the broken piece.  They’ve taken stem cells and injected them into mice that were paralyzed and the stem cells went to work rebuilding their previously snapped spinal cords.  Within weeks they were walking…  Think of the potential here, no more transplants, just simply regrowing organs or whatever damaged tissue you may have. When I lived in San Diego, my roommate told me that we didn’t have to worry about our livers, as they’d be growing them in petri dishes by they time we needed them.  That may not be that far fetched.  My grandmother has macular degeneration, which unless you’ve got an old person in your life who’s going blind, you probably have no idea what that is.  Its just an eye defect where they eye retains fluid and slowly degenerates.  My grandmother is mostly blind now,  however there is hope, as a company in the UK is working on using stem cells to repair the degenerated eye.  Basically inject the cells into the eyes and let them start rebuilding.  They have said that they plan to have that problem knocked out in 5 years.  Which is significant considering 25% of people over 70 are afflicted with it.  So not only do stem cells have the ability to morph into any human cell type, (I have visions of T2) but they also reproduce asyncronously.  The cell basically splits and creates two daughter cells which are exact clones of the parent.  Since they can clone themselves, you only need a few to get the process started.  This however has the adverse effect of behaving like cancer. This seems to be one of the bigger stumbling blocks right now, as they’re working on ways to stop them from reproducing after they’ve accomplished they’re goal. This is going to change medicine and we’ll no longer need pills and potions, just a batch of rebuilding cells encoded with the right instructions to rebuild whatever is broken.  Wikipedia has one of the better explanation pages http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stem_cell

-kev