the other day i got talking to a customer who often comes into our store. she has a full hejob so i knew she was a muslem. she told me that she is from the UAE and is a professor at a university. she is here in this country doing stem cell research. well, that is something i am very interested in and so i had all kinds of questions to ask her. the thing i was not aware of and which piqued my interest was that scientists and doctors no longer need to get involved with embryonic stem cells. now they are working with adult cells. they take the grown up cells from the patient and program them back to their beginning and then they re-program these “new” cells in a way to produce the tissues they want to produce. one great advantage of this procedure is that since the tissue is produced from the patient’s own cells, there is not going to be any rejections. so i asked her how long will it take to make a piece of liver large enough for transplant. she said about a month. but the problem is that it is not economically feasible to produce tissues this way yet and also they are having some problems with older cells. the cells of older patients are more difficult to be reprogrammed. so the younger the patient the better chance of using his cells to produce organs. thousands of people die every year needlessly due to the lack of organs. it is easy to register and become an organ donor and save not one but may be two or three lives.
