A new way of creating stem cells!!

According to a team of researchers based in Japan at the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology, stem cells can be created in a new and less controversial way. The basic idea behind their research was attempting to mimic the stresses the body faces when it is injured (this is because when the body is injured, adult cells revert back to their embryonic stem cell state to fix the injured area). So, the researchers experimented with multiple procedures to create the stress on white blood cells of an adult mouse. They went from heating the white blood cells, to starving them, all the way to squeezing them through a thin tube. Finally, however, they found a stress that might just be a revolutionary discovery.

It turns out that the stress that worked the best was placing the white blood cells into an acidic solution of about 5.7 pH. This then resulted in exactly what the team of researchers had hoped for: the white blood cell turned into a state similar to that of an embryonic stem cell. Using this procedure, they were able to create all the necessary tissues for an adult mouse and were in fact able to created a new mouse embryo!

This absolutely stunning procedure has one challenge: applying it to the cells of humans. As another biochemist, Austin Smith, puts it, "The method could have many applications, but it really depends on finding out if and how we can extend this in humans." If scientists are able to discover a way to apply this to human cells, we will be able to do countless scientific miracles that scientists have only dreamed about to this day. We can go anywhere from regrowing severed limbs to curing Parkinson's to curing cardiovascular disease and countless numbers of others diseases and disorders.

I would like to see if this will raise any controversy, as previous methods of stem cell researching have encountered. Since we are not destroying the embryos of humans to obtain the stem cells, this is much less controversial then before. Hopefully, this procedure faces minimal controversial attack and can be adjusted to work on human cells. If this is successful, science will see a whole new epoch of endless opportunities.