The story of stem cells is the story of life itself…A fascinating account of countless, miniscule custodians of new life in the human body,
inherently capable of regeneration and repair …In the eternal fight against disease and disorder.
How and when did we first discover these micro champions?
There can be different answers to this primordial question depending on how we look at it…And there’s nothing right or wrong about any of them.
We could trace their history in Greek and Indian mythology in the miraculous regenerative abilities of umpteen deities and demons...
We could attach their discovery to the scientific literature of German biologist Ernst Haeckel...
We could say the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings proved the first spark when scientists were studying the fatal radiation effect on blood cells...
The finding could also be attributed to Russian academic Alexander Maximow whose pioneering theory established the multi-potency of blood cells...
Or we could also link the ‘first steps’ to a host of fascinating breakthroughs – either the first frog cloning experiments of the 1950s, the first bone marrow transplant for treating leukemia in 1969, the advent of in vitro fertilization in 1978 or the first umbilical cord blood transplant in 1988...
The stem cell timeline not so much in terms of milestones tagged with ‘first ever’ claims. We should regard it as an eternal voyage of earnest breakthroughs that has stretched the possibilities of medical advancement to unexpected territories in fascinating ways.
A crusade driven by pure altruism to serve the larger cause of regenerative medicine that, in the process, aims to:
…secure hope from the clutches of hype,
…eliminate the friction linked to the science, and,
…explode the fiction thrust on it.
A study of history becomes most fruitful if it helps in introspection. We definitely cherish every single milestone in the glorious history of regenerative medicine, but our mind is transfixed on every single possibility of a collaboration or co-creation to help establish stem cell transplantation as an effective mainstream clinical application for the treatment of disease and disorder and improvement of life quality and longevity.
Miles to Go…