Stem Cells
This is about an amazing potential in medicine and health, the ability to eliminate any problem anywhere in your body by repairing it with perfectly good cells that are made by differentiating stem cells. Lets first start out by explaining exactly what stem cells are, where they came from, and why they are so important. Stem cells are blank cells that can develop into virtually any kind of cell in the human body. Most cells are specialized for one function, but stem cells have not gone through the process of being assigned a specific function. They came about when researchers took sperm from a man and an egg from a woman and fertilized them in a petri dish for several days until they became a blastocyte, or a ball of cells. The researchers then took special cells out of the blastocyte and cultured them to produce stem cells.
A colony of embryonic stem cells, from the H9 cell...
English: Embryonic Stem Cells. (A) shows hESCs. (B...
Mouse embryonic stem cells. More lab photosThis is different than the previous way they cultured stem cells, before July 21, 2001, that being taking the undifferentiated cells from a dead fetus.
Research on stem cells began in November of 1998 when researchers were successful in isolating the stem cells in a lab. At first a select few scientists only realized the enormous potential of stem cells. Then, in the U.S. and other places all over the world stem cell funding and research went rampant. Here are some ideas and potential researched by scientists in other parts of the world; Australians make a huge stem cell breakthrough by discovering that stem cells are able to generate themselves into other, specialized cells, in particular the types of cells which naturally fight disorders or replace damaged or diseased cells. Before this research it was not known if mature brain cells could do this too. "It's really taken us this...
Incomplete
The essay has a good skeleton basis, but it lacks any current information, as the medical field is constantly changing, and so is this information. For instance, in the European laws section, Germany was excluded and they are MAJOR researchers in the area of stem cells. This may want to be included. Also, it offers no real stance, until the end, which may be ok, but I think it should be elaborated on a bit more to give a clear definition of the author's thoughts.
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