Word: typing
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...until that evening that a nurse thought to dip a testing strip into Sam's urine and they finally got a diagnosis. The boy's body was flooded with sugar; he had Type 1 diabetes. Then, as now, the disease had no cure, and patients like Sam need to perform for themselves the duties their pancreas cannot - keeping track of how much glucose they consume and relying on an insulin pump to break down the sugars when their levels climb too high. The diagnosis changed not only Sam's life but the lives of his parents and older sister Emma...
...today the field encompasses far more than just embryonic and adult stem cells; it has expanded into the broader field of regenerative medicine, and Melton's lab at Harvard is at the vanguard, bringing the newest type of stem cells, which do not rely on embryos at all, closer to the clinic, where patients will actually benefit. Last summer, Melton stunned the scientific community with yet another twist, finding a way to generate new populations of cells by reprogramming one type of fully mature cell so it simply became another, bypassing stem cells altogether. "If I were in high school...
...going to tolerate being put out of this field by ideological views that we don't think are correct." Melton's motivation was, again, both professional and intensely personal. Two months after Bush announced his ban, Melton's daughter Emma, then 14, also received a diagnosis of Type 1 diabetes...
Before that can happen, however, Melton wants to learn more about how diseases develop. And iPS cells make that possible too. For the very first time, he can watch Type 1 diabetes unfold in a petri dish as a patient's cells develop from their embryonic state into mature pancreatic cells. The same will be true for other diseases as well. "There is a good reason we don't have treatments for diseases like Parkinson's," says Melton. "That's because the only way science can study them is to wait until a patient appears in the office with symptoms...
...true power of reprogramming, however, does not stop with the stem cell. This summer, Melton flirted with the rules of biology once again when he generated another batch of history-making cells, switching one type of adult pancreatic cell, which does not produce insulin, to a type that does - without using stem cells at all. Why, he thought, do we need to erase a mature cell's entire genetic memory? If it's possible to reprogram cells back to the embryo, wouldn't it be more efficient in some cases to go back only part of the way and simply...