Stem Cells: Damn We've Come a Long Way in a Short Time
This is "old" (April) news but I wanna' talk about it anyway.
http://www.tcpalm.com/news/2009/aug/...-stem-cell-by/
My sister is part of the team doing this. This shit is unreal and I really don't know why it doesn't lead the news every night. The above link in a nutshell:
*The fetus controversy is done. They can now take any cell from your body and revert it to a stem cell. Your own DNA. No compatibility problems like you would have from a fetus.
*They drove the point home by taking a skin cell from a mouse, reverting it to a stem cell, letting it divide for a bit and then shoving it into another mouse's womb, and ending up growing an entire damn mouse. No sperm. No egg. Just a skin cell. No wonky "aged" cells in the newborn mouse. Just a perfect viable mouse. It was even able to reproduce.
The fun thing about this is that stem cells have various "levels". Take a cell from a finger and you can revert it back to "arm bud" for example and grow an arm but nothing else. Keep reverting and that finger cell can grow the whole body. They are working on growing individual organs. It's working. Word is 5-10 years (the team is saying 5, I'm guessing 10) before organ transplant waiting lists are a thing of the past. Anti-rejection medication would be gone as well.
Purely speculation on my own part, but seems to me like only a matter of decades before we can revert our bodies to a 20-year-old state. The cells are biologically young. They become whatever they are near. Just keep injecting yourself all over your body over a 10-year period and eventually you will have a young body. My sister gave me a "yeah, that might work" over the phone without really thinking too deeply about it. So don't hold me to that one. :D
Won't work on the brain. I mean, it will make your brain young, but they don't know how to introduce that many new cells into your melon while keeping your memories.
What I want to know: If we can grow perfectly compatible organs and stay young, what happens when we aren't dying fast enough to make room for others? There's a medical ethics dilemma and a half.
