Stem Cells

The book I read to research this post was Stem Cells for Dummies by Meg Scheinder et al which is an excellent book which I bought from Kindle. Stem Cells are cells that help you reproduce cells. In humans they are found in quite a lot of places including the brain & heart. Humans are incapable of growing limbs but some animals like crayfish can. Stem Cells connected with reproduction are called Embrionic Stem Cells & these are particularly controversial because some people think we will be cloning people in the near future. In fact it might be possible to clone sheep & dogs but humans are much more complicated. In fact any kind of cloning weakens the DNA & the clone is liable to have disabilities or at the very least weakened DNA. Dolly the sheep which was a clone only lived 6 years which is half what you would expect a sheep to live to. In the 60's they did an experiment with mice where there irradiated there blood & bones & then transplanted bone marrow into some of them. The ones who had the transplants mostly survived. It was from this that the standard treatment for leukemia was born. With this they give chemotherapy to the bones which destroys the marrow & then transplant new marrow which will hopefully grow & replace the infected marrow. A little while ago a religious cult called the Raelists which believes that aliens produced us by cloning 25,000 years ago, claimed to be cloning. It's thought this was just a publicity stunt & they haven't got access to this kind of technology. In America a lot of Stem Cell research is funded by the government & the various state governments. Industry in general won't fund it because much of it is experimental by nature & getting any profits is in the long term. Stem Cell research offers hope to people with illnesses like parkinson's & alheimzers which currently are largely incurable. They can't even alleviate a lot of the symptoms.