Stem Cells In Adult Tissue example essay topic

Stem Cells: What You Should Know About Stem Cells Before You Decide What Course Science Should Take. A topic of extended scientific and ethical debate in our society as of late has been the question of Stem Cell research. Going down this path could yield unprecedented medical leaps in treatment and prevention that medicine will be able to offer. Before I address the debate of whether or not Stem Cell research should be done, I want to first explain to my readers what stem cells are, how they come to be and what we can use them for. We must first start with the different types of cells, I will explain them as I take you through part of the fetal development process. The first type of cell is the totipotent cell.

This cell is created when a sperm fertilizes an egg. This kind of cell can become anything within the human body. After four days the totipotent cell begins to specialize by becoming a blastocyst. The blastocyst contains an outer layer of cells and an inner cell mass. The outer layer of cells will become the placenta and other support tissues for the fetus as it develops. The inner cell mass will go on to become virtually every type of tissue within the human body.

The inner cell mass cannot create a placenta. Since it cannot form a placenta, it is no longer totipotent. It now becomes pluripotent, a cell with the ability to become any number of tissues within the human body. This is the cell that scientists are interested in. One part of Stem Cell debate is the question of when is a fetus a fetus? At what point is the potential for human life extinguished?

At this stage the pluripotent cells while able to form almost every human tissue, cannot for a placenta. Therefore if you were to place the cells into another woman's uterus a fetus would not develop. From this point the pluripotent cells further specialize and become the cells that create heat tissue or brain tissue etc. We need to understand the complex events that occur at this stage of development. There are genes referred to as? decision making? genes. These genes direct how and what the pluripotent cells become.

Now I will get into the possible benefits of Stem Cell research. Once we learn how the decision making genes work we can then begin to use the pluripotent cells to create the typed of tissues needed to treat patients with various types of sickness and disease. There is a bonus here as well. Birth defects and cancer arise do to abnormal cell specialization and cell division. If we can understand how to manipulate the decision making genes than we can effectively prevent birth defects and cancer before the problems ever arise!

Once we are able to create these stem cell lines a variety of possibilities will be open to us. The first is the ability to speed up our future drug testing. This benefit should please animal rights activists. If we create a line of human stem cells for new drugs to be tested on than we can assess the negative and positive effects on the stem cell tissue before the drug is ever used on an animal or a human. Not only that but testing new drugs on stem cells increase the amount of information we can learn because we can target specific and more varied tissues that previously we had access to. Now I will get into more direct benefits of stem cell research.

Pluripotent stem cells can be directed to develop into almost any kind of tissue, and this creates the possibility for a renewable source of replacement tissues and cells. What does that mean? We would be able to better treat and cure a large number of diseases and injuries including but not limited to: Parkinson?'s, Alzheimer?'s, spinal cord injury, stroke, burns, heart disease, diabetes, osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis. I have included an example taken from the National Institute of Health's Primer on Stem Cells: Transplant of healthy heart muscle cells could provide new hope for patients with chronic heart disease whose hearts can no longer pump adequately. The hope is to develop heart muscle cells from human pluripotent stem cells and transplant them into the failing heart muscle in order to augment the function of the failing heart.

Preliminary work in mice and other animals has demonstrated that healthy heart muscle cells transplanted into the heart successfully repopulate the heart tissue and work together with the host cells. These experiments show that this type of transplantation is feasible. Fetal tissue is not the only source of stem cells. Researchers have been able to isolate stem cells in adult tissue. Stem cells have not been found in every type of tissue, but as research continues so do the findings.

One problem with using stem cells to create new tissue for patients is the question of whether or not it will be rejected by the host. If the tissue is grown from the hosts own stem cells than the chance for rejection is negligible. This also means that the host will not have to take immune-suppressing drugs and deal with all of the side affects that they can create. It is my opinion that researchers should do all the research that they can with the fetal tissue that they already have, and then focus on adult stem cells.

This way the ethical debate can continue as well as the stem cell research without either of the two getting in each others way. Scientists believe that adult stem cell research may yield the same results but that it will take longer. The reason that it will take longer is because unlike pluripotent cells, the adult stem cells have already become specialized cells to create a certain type of tissues and will have to be re-directed to make the new tissue. The other fear is that these adult stem cells decrease with age. There may come a point when we need to use fetal tissue, but should that point come we may have already come to an ethical decision on what to do and with the knowledge already gained in research of adult stems cells we should be able to proceed quickly. Stem cell research is incredibly important.

We as a civilization are standing on the brink of a major leap for our society and we must take that leap. Who knows that kinds of doors this research could open, who knows that other leads it could unveil for us? This research has the ability to change out culture, like the discovery of fire and the harnessing of electricity. We can? t let it slip away. Works Consulted: Adult Stem Cells May be Re definable.

24. Oct. 2001. British Medical Journal. 24. Oct. 2001. web Cells and the Human Embryo. 24.

Oct. 2001. The Center for Bioethics and human Dignity. 29. Oct. 2001. web Cells: A Primer.

23. Oct. 2001. National Institute of Health. 29 Oct. 2001. web of Nigel Cameron, PH.D. 24.

Oct. 2001. Do No Harm Coalition. 24. Oct. 2001. web.