Question: If you make stem cells, would you do a stem cell operation to heal people?

David Christensen answered on 20 Nov 2013:

I work with embryonic stem cells and am trying to understand how to keep them happy to stay as embryonic stem cells rather than how to make them into other cells, so I don’t do this kind of thing, but lots of scientists are trying to do this.

We take embryonic stem cells from embryos and can make these stem cells become other types of cell. If a person has an injury or a defect in their heart, then we can try to make heart cells from stem cells and then give these heart cells to the person to try to heal and repair their heart. This is what we hope to do with stem cells at least. At the moment scientists don’t know exactly how to make the stem cells become other types of cells, so we can’t yet start healing and curing sick people with stem cells until we know that we can do it. Some scientists have managed to make a heart using stem cells which they were able to transplant into a rat, so hopefully it won’t be very many years before we can do something similar for people.