• Question: What would life belike without stem cells? And what would your life be like?

    Asked by katrina1998 to Anzy, Aoife, Dave, Matt, Tomasz on 15 Nov 2013. This question was also asked by sophiexxxx, battleborn, cookiejayden.
    • Photo: David Christensen

      David Christensen answered on 15 Nov 2013:

      We probably wouldn’t live very long without stem cells. Stem cells in our bodies replace dying cells. We all see that we have dead skin sometimes and we know this get’s replaced. Without stem cells, we would lose all our skin quite quickly! Similarly, cells in our bodies die and need to get replaced by new ones. Without stem cells our intestines would very quickly break apart as the cells that line the gut and absorb nutrients would die and not be replaced.
      If we hadn’t evolved to have stem cells, maybe we could survive without our cells dying, so that they didn’t need to be replaced. If our cells were not allowed to die, then we would probably be more likely to get cancer as more cells would get old and get a lot of mutations. We would probably die a lot younger this way too!

    • Photo: Matthew Tomlinson

      Matthew Tomlinson answered on 15 Nov 2013:

      Your life would be very short, stem cells are needed to create all the organs and tissues of the body, without them we wouldn’t grow and we wouldn’t be able to repair ourselves after injury. Also your cells are being replaced all the time, in fact I think over the course of about 10 years your body completely remodels your skeleton, meaning new cells have to be made to replace the old cells that have died.

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