Science fiction?: Stem cells

Some ground-breaking achievements in stem cells in the nearby future will have a high potential in making the world a worthy place to live in with people free from various kinds of diseases and disabilities making it one of the greatest achievements of the human evolution so far

You are driving a motorbike in a roadway that seemed to have been wrecked a very long time ago. Your wheel slips and you can’t control the handle which eventually causes you to trip and fall off the vehicle causing a severe injury to the spinal cord. But if medical science reaches to a newer height in the coming decades then it might not be the case. Scientists have been working on stem cells research to heal these kinds of injuries. All around the world, people are suffering from liver cancer, diabetes and some other form of intestinal cancer and stomach cancer. Some people are missing body parts like eyes, some don’t have legs, some don’t have hands and some are missing other important body parts. Among seven billion people in the world each and every one of them is suffering from different diseases and facing severe difficulties in life due to various injuries, diseases and missing various body parts.

The world is confronting new viruses and bacteria every day and deadly diseases are evolving time and again. Sometimes birds get inside the vicious circle of bird flu; humans are in precarious situations due to swine flue, the Ebola virus and the Zika virus. These kinds of chronic illness are not only putting humans at risk and the survival of living organisms as a whole in the present but also endangering their existence in the future.

Keeping in mind these risks scientists of the world are working hard to get through this scientific enigma to make the world a worthy place to live in with all the humans in a healthy state in all respects. The scientific world is trying to solve these issues with a single concept of stem cells to come with the medicines for every sort of disease, injury, biological problems and problems related to organ transplantation virtually all individuals of the world are suffering from.

Going through the concept of stem cells, basically, they are the undifferentiated cells of the human body. The specific functions of these cells are not found yet. These cells have high potentials of differentiating into various other stem cells, and specialized cells and tissues of the body to form various organs. There are two types of stem cells. They are embryonic stem cells and adult stem cells.

Embryonic stem cells are the pluripotent cells which have the needed potential to differentiate into any kinds of specialized cells of the body. These kinds of cells are found in the blastocyst phase of an embryo. After  5-9 days after the fertilization takes place by the fusion of sperm and egg the blastocyst is formed. They undergo further differentiation to give more stem cells, and other specialized cells like skin cells, blood cells and nerve cells and eventually they are capable of   creating a complete organism which would be a major achievement.

Unlike embryonic stem cells, adult stem cells are multipotent cells which can give rise to only specific types of cells. These stem cells are found both in adults and children. These cells have specialized functions in the body to replace the dying and damaged cells to heal the injuries. For example, when the skin cells get old or are injured, they are replaced by adult stem skin cells.

In the research field, embryonic stem cells have been given more concern because of their omnipotent characteristics. Even though these embryonic stem cells are extracted by destroying the left-over embryos obtained during the process of In Vitro fertilization, it is a topic of much controversy.

The entire scientific community is polarised into two halves. Some say that using these embryonic stem cells for research purposes can be lucrative in making breakthroughs in the scientific world and eventually, in making the lives of people much more better in the future. On the other hand, some are against it by advocating the right of the embryo to develop into a complete human.

Amid various controversies, stem cells researches have been making some ground-breaking developments.

Adult stem cell treatments have been used for many years to treat successfully leukaemia and related bone/blood cancers through bone marrow transplants. Moreover, in 2006 Shinya Yamanaka of Japan pioneered the concept of induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) by genetically reprogramming adult stem cells to act like embryonic stem cells. Even though iPSCs has been successfully examined in mice, more studies are going on to make it possible in humans.

Reading about stem cell and its potentiality seems just like science fiction to many of us, but the way scientists of the world are working on it, this fantasy of the scientific world will probably be available very soon.

Some ground-breaking achievements in stem cells in the nearby future will have a high potential in making the world a worthy place to live in with people free from various kinds of diseases and disabilities making it one of the greatest achievements of the human evolution so far.