http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1874840,00.html
My article starts off with telling the story of Douglas Melton's son finding out that he has Type 1 diabetes. Once Melton found this out he wanted to do something that could find a cure since this diagnosis was a big change for his family. He became convinced that stem cells would play a big role in new therapies that will treat and maybe cure diabetes and diseases with no treatment.
The field in which stem cells are being studied has been revolved around embryonic stem cells or adult stem cells. Embryonic stem cells are cells that are taken from an embryo and could turn into any of the body’s 200 tissue types. Adult stem cells are cells that are taken from mature organs or skin that are limited to becoming only certain types of tissue.
Canadian researchers Ernest McCulloch and James Till where the first to prove that stem cells existed in blood. They decided to take mice and destroy their immune cells. They then injected bone-marrow cells into the mice’s spleens and saw a ball of cells grow from each injection site. Each mass had emerged from a single stem cell which generated new blood cells. From this discovery, 35 years later James Thomson isolated the first embryonic stem cell. This then inspired other researchers to eventually replace cells that had been damaged or taken over by disease.
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