| Don't Waste, Duplicate! |
| Stem Cells |
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| Tomorrow |
| What does this technology hold for the future? |
| Scientists hope that in the future this technology (stem cells) will be able to cure some of today's most devastating and crippling (pun intended) diseases; degenerative disc disease (a disease that causes the discs in the spinal cord to collapse and cause the vertebrae in the spinal column to rub against each other, causing extreme pain and eventually crippling the individual), Scleroderma (a disease which leads to a thickening of the skin and an immobility of the joints), Leukemia (cancer of the blood), Alzheimer's Disease (the slow degeneration of brain tissue), and many, many more. |
| Will this help or hurt our currently fragile economy? |
| This technology can only help. It will create new jobs (we will need people to specialize in tissue growth, measurement, surgeons that know how to correctly insert the tissues, specialists to prevent rejection from the body, etc.), it will cut down on the healthcare industry's carbon footprint (instead of transplant organs being flown in they can be driven in - or better yet, grown on site), and it may increase the effectiveness of transplantations. |
| How will it reduce costs, and for whom? |
| Stem cell research will reduce costs for individuals - in more ways than one may think. Sure, it will be cheaper to have an organ grown in, say, a pig, but the day-to-day guilt that the transplant recipient feels will be lessened so much more. Think about it, guilt-wise, would you rather receive the heart of a twenty-three year old college student who made one fatal decision and got in a car with a drunk friend one night, or the heart from a cluster of yet undifferentiated cells? Or perhaps you receive your heart from a genetically modified pig that had a human heart? Wouldn't that give you less guilt than receiving a healthy young adult's heart? The moral price is lower as well as the economic price. In today's world we can use all the morality we can get! |
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| My Dad |
| Why did I make this website? My dad has degenerative disc disease. It is a disease for which science has no cure, nor an explanation. For unknown reasons, this disease suddenly causes degeneration of the discs between the vertebrae of the back - causing the bone to rub together. My dad experiences intense pain daily. In order to cope with some of the pain, every three months he receives a steroid shot that essentially turns off the nerve that is pinched between two bones in his spinal cord from the lack of cushioning by the disc that is nearly completely collapsed. However, he cannot get the shot forever, it would eventually kill him. My dad is an avid cyclist. Because of this disease, eventually he will no longer be able to walk, let alone ride a bicycle. I dread the day that I will have to look at my father as his doctors (or perhaps I, as a doctor) tell him that he won't be able to ride another century (a 100 mile bike race), or walk his daughter down the aisle. Perhaps stem cell therapies will become more advanced with more research, and that day will never come. This website was built in an effort to inform you, the reader, about the wonders of biotechnology and all it has to offer us. Don't be afraid of it's power, its a wonderful tool that, used responsibly, has the potential to save millions of lives like my dad's. |
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| My dad on his first century in Lake Tahoe after his diagnosis with degenerative disc disease. |