In the early 1960s, the Canadian researchers J. Till and E. A. McCulloch began working on a process that involved injecting bone marrow cells into mice that had undergone radiation. They observed that nodules appeared in the mouse spleens in direct correlation to the number of bone marrow cells injected. Till and McCulloch began to suspect that each nodule arose from a single marrow cell--perhaps a stem cell. They were joined in their work by a graduate student Andy Becker and a molecular biologist Lou Siminovitch, and together the group determined that these cells were capable of regenerating. This was a very exciting concept.

Further gains were made by James Thomson at the University of Wisconsin who was the first scientist to create a stable line of human embryonic stem cells. In 1998, he removed cells from inside a week-old embryo (blastocyst) and cultured these cells, 50 to 100 of them, in a laboratory dish.

The discovery of stem cells has brought great excitement to medical researchers because stem cells are unspecialized cells that have two primary and very important properties:

1.      They can differentiate and become other cells in the body.

2.      They have the ability to regenerate on their own.

In addition to having the ability to develop into many types of specialized cells within the body, stem cells seem to be able to divide without limit. They seem to serve as a sort of repair system for the body. The new cell created may remain a stem cell or it may go off to serve a function where it is most needed--perhaps becoming a muscle, blood, or brain cell. Scientists are working to determine how and whether they can control this differentiation process as that would offer amazing prospects for developing new types of cures. . .

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