Stem Cells

18/11/2019
Using Stem cells as Treatment
• Stem cells can be used to treat conditions such as:
• Diabetes
• Paralysis
• Alzheimer’s
• But it can also be used for research into things like:
• Studying how stem cells develop into heart muscle cells could provide clues
about how we could induce heart muscle to repair itself after a heart attack.
• The cells could be used to study disease, identify new drugs, or screen drugs
for toxic side effects.
 Therapeutic Cloning
• An embryo is produced, with
the same genes as the patient,
and stem cells are taken from
it.
• These stem cells are not
rejected by the patients body
so many be used to treat
disease
• The Stem cells taken from
embryos can be used to
differentiate into any cell type
but are difficult to obtain
Adult Stem Cells
Issues with Stem Cell research
• Using stem cells carries
the risk of spreading viral
infection.
• There are also many
ethical and religious
concerns with Stem cells
also.
• Can you think of any
concerns that people may
have?
 For Against
Provides an opportunity to cure life High cost for patients
threatening diseases

An embryo isn’t a life, only cells, so using People may see life as starting from
them for Stem Cell research is fine conception so they see using an embryo
for research as immoral
Gives scientists an opportunity to further Stem cells are hard to obtain and take
research into cell growth and long to grow once obtained
development
There has been little success with stem
cells thus far
Using Stem Cells in Plants
• Stem cells from meristems in plants can be
used to produce clones of plants quickly
and economically
• Meristems are found close to the tip of the
root and the shoot
• This can be beneficial for a number of
reasons:
1. Rare species can be cloned to be protected
from extinction
2. Crop plants with special features such as
disease resistance can be cloned to produce
large numbers of identical plants for farmers.