No Embryos Required

For years, stem cell research has been a very controversial topic.  Research on stem cells could prove to aid the human race in a big way, but the way in which the stem cells are collected causes a great amount of opposition to the use of them.  For the most versatile stem cells to be collected, it meant destroying human embryos.  So to avoid the disdain of the public, scientists have been trying to find new ways to collect stem cells that does not involve the destruction of embryos.  “It’s an exciting time in stem cell biology for a host of reasons,” says Paul Fairchild, co-director of the newly founded Oxford Stem Cell Institute.  “We’ve entered a whole new phase in the stem cell field, which has been held up enormously by ethical issues for over a decade.”  What is causing all this stem cell, non-embryo buzz?  Induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells

[caption id="attachment_1463" align="alignright" width="460" caption="stem cells completing the process of mitosis"][/caption]

.  These iPS cells avoid the ethical issues faced by stem cell collection, are easier to make, give scientists an inexhaustible supply of material, and bring the scientific world a step closer to the hoped-for treatments that could be provided by stem cells.  In 2007, Shinya Yamanaka at Kyoto University in Japan demonstrated a way to produce embryonic stem (ES)-like cells without the use of eggs.  “He took a skin cell and, using a virus, inserted four specific bits of DNA into the skin cell’s nucleus.  The skin cell incorporated the genetic material and was regressed into an ES-like cell”.  With that, a few experiments later, scientists had a near-limitless supply of stem cells that seemed to be just as good as ES cells.

This new way of harvesting stem cells may seem like it has no downside, but there are still some bugs that need to be worked out with the iPS cell.  A lab in Helsinki found genetic abnormalities when creating the iPS cells, in which they reported the deletion or amplification of certain strands of DNA.  Another concern is stemmed from the same traits that make them so great for a laboratory.  The iPS cells are both versatile and practically immortal, and these cells left in a person unchecked could prove to be disastrous.   I believe that these cells are worth looking into further.  The idea of what stem cells are capable of is amazing as it is, but the collection of them has been conceived as non-ethical and has held up the research for years.  These iPS cells could alter the scientific world as we know it… once they get the bugs worked out.