What's so remarkable about these cells is that they can be coaxed into becoming any cell in the body. They could potentially be used to treat such things as diabetes and heart disease. Imagine being able to grow replacement brain, muscle, and bone and organ tissue in the laboratory, which can be implanted into a patient without being rejected. Cardiac muscle destroyed by a heart attack could also be repaired. The same goes for brain tissue damaged by a stroke, and severed spinal cords. Paralysed victims of spinal injuries, such as Christopher Reeve, might have been able to walk again. More and more people are suffering from incurable diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's in which our nervous systems are degenerating.
Stem cells could offer a lifeline for these patients, as they can be turned into replacement neurone to be transplanted into diseased brains.
How did it begin?
Like many scientific revolutions, it started quietly. In 1998, James Thomson at the University of Wisconsin announced that he had isolated stem cells from embryos.
With chemical manipulation, they could form any other cell in the body. Interest from the outside world increased when John Gearhart at Johns Hopkins University grew a set of cells from the gonads, which suggested that therapeutic cloning was possible. By 2001, a team from Wisconsin believed they could produce an inexhaustible supply of blood cells.
For a few years now scientists working with animals have seen that stem cells from bone marrow can help repair a damaged heart. Now researchers in the UK have tried it in human patients. They extracted bone marrow from 14 people who had just had a heart attack, and injected cultured cells from the marrow back into the patients' hearts.
Within weeks of treatment, the heart wall was able to contract better, improving the flow of blood around the body.
The problem with stem cell research is the source from which they come. The sources of the stem cells come from early embryos and this is proving to be very distasteful to some. President Bush has allowed only limited public research funds to be spent in this field. Reeve accuses Bush of listening to the Christian right at the expense of reasoned scientific opinion. However, he congratulated Tony Blair and the House of Lords for Britain’s decision to allow some forms of stem cell research. At the Labour Party Conference in Blackpool Tony Blair said he was “proud” to have been thanked by Superman. Nevertheless, even in the UK opinion is mixed.
Pro life and Anti-abortion campaigners are opposed to such research because it results in human embryos being destroyed. ‘The destruction of human embryonic life is unnecessary for medical progress, as alternative methods of obtaining human stem cells and of repairing and regenerating human tissue exist and continue to be developed’. They also believe it to be “wrong for one human life to be used for the benefit of another”. They have also rejected the need for embryonic stem cell research; saying tests on animals would prove just as useful. Reeve believed that adult stem cells “cannot get the job done” and that the ability to manipulate these forms of cells “could save millions of lives”.
There is also a strong religious lobbying against using embryonic stem cell research. When the Pope visited George Bush last year, he told the US president that the work was as evil as infanticide, because obtaining the cells involves destroying early stage human embryos, and US Catholic bishops told him that the work is "illegal, immoral and unnecessary".
So what then happens in the future?
How close is the research to delivering treatments?
In addition, will they find that stem cells are actually in adults, which solves the problems of extracting the material from embryos?
Alternatively, will it all turn out to be too good to be true and we'll learn that there are too many side effects to make stem cell therapy safe?
The above are questions we may never know the answers to, we will just have to wait and see.
