“Imagine re-growing a severed fingertip, or creating an organ in the lab that can be transplanted into a patient without risk of rejection. It sounds like science fiction, but it’s not. It’s the burgeoning field of regenerative medicine, in which scientists are learning to harness the body’s own power to regenerate itself, with astonishing results.”
I recently heard about the so called HeLa-Cells, which are often used for research purposes in laboratoraties worldwide.
1951, the original cells have been taken from a person called Henrietta Lacks, whose name has been changed to Helen Lane by the hospital in charge, and have been the very first human cells that have been used to establish a permanent cell culture. Henrietta Lacks died by cancer 8 months after the extraction.
The thing is that today, after cultivating the original cells over a long time, the amount of cells currently existing exceeds the body volume of Henrietta Lacks a hundred times and more…
picture taken from http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa-Zellen
