• Question: Hi I would like to what stem cell are and did you know who many stem cell our bodies and would it

    Asked by sive1911 to Aoife, Dave, Matt, Tomasz on 20 Nov 2013.
    • Photo: Matthew Tomlinson

      Matthew Tomlinson answered on 20 Nov 2013:

      Hi sive1911

      Stem cells are the cells that make every cell in your body, the first stem cell is the fertilised egg and all other cells come from that. There are stem cells throughout your body continuously making new cells to replace cells which have become damaged or die of old age, for example red blood cells live for about 100-120 days before they need to be replaced. This replacement happens about 2.4 million times per second(!), without stem cells this would be impossible.

      As for how many stem cells are in the body, I have no idea and I doubt anybody could give a good answer. There are between 10 and 50 trillion cells in the body and only a very small fraction of these will be stem cells, but as for how many I really don’t know.

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