3 ms·
> It would be very very bad if, say, muscle cells suddenly started behaving like liver cells. There are people that would like to sacrifice a few muscle cells
by choeger 5y ago
> It would be very very bad if, say, muscle cells suddenly started behaving like liver cells.
There are people that would like to sacrifice a few muscle cells for some liver cells (or any other organ). Recreating such specialized cells would be a big step towards organ regrowth, would it not?
- _Wintermute 5y agoThis is the idea behind stem cell therapy. You can reset specialized cells back to their "possibilities are endless" stem cell state and then attempt to coerce them to form the type of cells you want. Search for "induced pluripotent stem cells" if this sort of thing interests you.
- usrbinbash 5y agoThis is actually an area of research, "releasing" the locks of the epigenetic code and getting differentiated somatic cells to behave like pluripotent stem cells again, in order to use them to recreate damaged tissue. However, while that would be fine in a test.tube, it would be very bad if it happened inside the bodys existing differentiated tissue.