Sunday, December 27, 2009

Well if it isn't Vitamin C again. Inducible Pluripotent Stem Cells Need It.

The race towards rejuvenating the body by literally rebuilding it continues on in the milieu of stem cells. There is still quite a large misunderstanding of what one is, and actually there isn't one, there are many from many sources. Right now, your body is churning out cells from your own stem cells in your bone marrow, muscles, organs, everywhere. The problem is to keep this process going in an organized way well into old age. Too little, and you get the familiar loss of function of old age. Too much, and you get things like cancer.

Another promising new field of work is taking any cell from the adult body which contains the chromosomal makeup of the entire body except in rare chimeric cases, and taking it back to a primordial source cell. This inducible pluripotent stem cell (IPSC) can be tweaked to become an entirely different cell, offering hope for organ and tissue regeneration and repair or even rebuilding entire systems in the future.

Some grouchy old persons will be annoyed to read that you can't do it efficiently without Vitamin C.

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