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 Stem Cell Primer: Are There Stem Cells in Your Future?

Where are we going with this research? Through these kinds of studies, we are going to learn how to instruct our own cells to get them to do what we want them to do. Embryonic stem cells are going to go away. We are learning very rapidly what stem is, and we are getting some success in translating this into taking a somatic cell and converting it to a stem cell. The real goal of this is to take a patient's cell, convert it to a stem cell of some kind that we can then use it to regenerate the need for that patient, and it's going to happen. This is going to be the future, and we are going to give ethicists a lot more work to do when we begin to think about manipulating our own cells and instructing them to get them to do what we want them to do. Both good and bad, right? But I think this is where all this work is going. So anyway, thank you for your attention. I hope you have some appreciation of stem cell biology 101.