Question: What do you think that stem cells can achieve?

Robert Hampson answered on 11 Nov 2014:

Stem cells have the potential to achieve quite a lot. Imagine, if all of the dreams of stem cell scientists come true, one day we could grow you a new heart from a scaffold printed on a 3D printer and some of your skin cells reverted back to a stem cell state. Currently you’d have to wait for a suitable person to suffer a fatal accident with no damage to their heart so that you could get a transplant. There are already some areas where stem cells are showing considerable promise, eye medicine is one area, I think it is a process for making new corneas (the transparent skin on the front of the eye) which has recently started clinical trails.

However, stem cell therapies still require a considerable amount of research effort. Current medicine generally use drugs (a single type of chemical molecule) to treat diseases, they are much easier to develop and regulate as there are fewer things that can go wrong. Trying to figure out what is wrong with a stem cell is like trying to figure out what is wrong with a space station that someone else has broken. It is difficult because often we simply don’t know how it works, there are so many different chemicals interacting in the cell! Some current techniques also have ethical problems which would need to be changed before they could be employed for large parts of the population as opposed to small experimental trials.