I’m a Scientist is like school science lessons meet the X Factor! School students choose which scientist gets a prize of $1000 to communicate their work.
Scientists and students talk on this website. They both break down barriers, have fun and learn. But only the students get to vote.
This zone is the Organs Zone. It has scientists studying health and disease in various parts of our bodies. Who gets the prize? YOU decide!
Hey there!!
Great question! Especially given I just saw some breaking news in this area last week!
There is a new and amazing technology called IPS cells (induced pluripotent stem cells) where scientists are learning to take a skin cell and using some very crazy (and difficult to understand technology) they reverse the cell into a stem cell! They can do this because all cells in the body originally come from the same 2 cells, the sperm and the egg, and the sperm and the egg can produce all the cells needed to make an entire human.
Anyway, once scientists have turned your skin into stem cells ( they do this in the lab, not on your body) they can now make white blood cells!
If you’d like more details, I’m happy to explain more of the science!! It’s very exciting!! We might be seeing them use this amazing technology for organ transplants, and for bone marrow transplants (white blood cell replacement) in the next few years!!
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Hi johnfowla,
Great question. And Hannah is right on the money. We can easily “clone” cells.
This, however, should not be confused though with “cloning” humans! There’s a huge ethical debate behind stem cell research, and dare I say the only problem stems from a difference between what we do and what the public thinks we do. It’s been lost in translation somewhere! The miss-informed think we’re playing god, but that’s nowhere near the truth.
The technology of growing cells has actually been used in bone marrow transplantation for a while now.
Hope that helps
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I agree Yashar and the more we can share about this new technology the less scary it will seem.
Scientists can actually use blood cells in addition to skin cells to create IPS cells too. After they have the blood sample, give the cells sustenance to make them grow, and then expose them to reprogramming factors that turn them back into the embryonic stem cells that they once were. Its a little like the film, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, where Benjamin is born old (like the mature blood cells) and then grows younger (like the embryonic stem cells). Once scientists have the patients stem cells, they can make them into other cells that the patient might need replaced, like heart cells! One of the most powerful things about this treatment is that the patient is treated with their own cells, with the same genetic code. The old treatment was to use someone else’s cells. Our bodies have a clever immune defence mechanism where they can find all foreign things that enter, like bacteria and virus and then destroy them. This is good for the common cold or flu but not for a life saving treatment like bone marrow transplants.
My scientist friends are studying how implanting stem cells in the brain might help Parkinsons disease, a terrible brain disease that affects people later on in life and affects their movement and memory. The dopamine brain cells in an area of the brain called the Substantia nigra (big name!) die in Parkinsons. Dopamine is a type of brain chemical that is important for mood and movement. My friends grow baby dopamine cells, implant them in the substantia nigra and encourage them to reconnect with other brain cells to restore normal function. Wish them luck!
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Very cool…I learned something new!
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That’s really cool!
The future will be amazing the way science continues to develop!
There are at least 5 different types of white blood cells (lymphocytes, monocytes, eosinophils, neutrophils, basophils) so scientists will need to be able to make each version which is unique depending on it’s function!
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