how to get stem cells

i want to tell you one story. and the storycame from the early 1950s. a woman named wanda ruth lunsford, she was a scientist in newyork city and she published one paper, which turned out to be her only paper in scienceand she was actually pushed out of science. what she did was she took an old rat and ayoung rat, she put them to sleep and she tied their skin together. so after about a dayor so their blood supplies joined. well, several weeks later she looked and in that old ratthere were new neurons growing in the brain, the heart beat stronger and the muscles werebigger. the gray hair turned brown again. she claimed she reversed aging. people callher dracula, frankenstein, all kinds of crazy names.

well, earlier this year three separate laboratoriesat harvard, stanford, university of california san francisco repeated the experiment andit worked. and what they showed is at age 25, in you and i, our stem cells go to sleepand get turned off. and proteins, from young mice in this case or young humans, can turnthem back on again. and when these stem cells get turned back on new neurons can be grown,repair happens much quicker in tissue. we all see that. our child breaks his leg heor she is back walking again in a couple weeks. you don't even know what happened. your grandmotherbreaks her leg and it hits her quality of life the rest of her life. so there are clinicaltrials now using proteins that were found in young individual to try to stimulate bonerepair in the elderly who have fractures.

and so just like a diabetic requires a shotof insulin so that they can manage their sugar, going forward if you break your leg in theelderly we may just give you a shot of these proteins to turn back on your stem cells soyou can repair quicker. we're trying it in cancer because cancer inkids is about 90 percent curable. once you turn 25 that same cancer turns incurable.so maybe if i can convince the body it's younger i can have, or we as a science community canhave, a bigger impact on cancer. so i leave you with that bit of hope that aging is somethingthat may be able to be reversed, and not so that we can live till 150 but so that we canall live until our ninth or tenth decade without there being a decrease in quality in thoselast decades, because that would be the goal,

quality years till the end.