Stem Cell Therapy Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Stem Cell Therapy - Essay Example Some stem cell researchers have advocated for the therapy in treating diseases like diabetes mellitus, Parkinson’s disease, ulcerative colitis, Duchenne muscular dystrophy, multiple sclerosis and other myopathy, hematopoietic organ diseases, oncological diseases, some hereditary and genetic abnormalities (Conrad, 2012). Some success rates in stem cell therapy exist in the field of oncology where cancer patients subjected to chemoprophylaxis may at one point require bone marrow transplantation or umbilical blood stem cells. Chemoprophylaxis in cancer patients often results in the destruction of cancer cells plus even hematopoietic cells. Stem cell often helps them in restoring their normal blood cells increasing their chances of survival from the disease. Therapeutic cloning is a type of stem cell therapy. Cloning is possible through the use of embryonic stem cells. Here, an egg gets denucleated, that is, the DNA gets removed, and replaced with a somatic cell nucleus. The egg gets stimulated through the use of an electric pulse, and a blastocyst gets formed to provide stem cells that are identical to those of the original somatic cell nucleus. If implanted in the womb, the replicated embryo can be born as a cloned baby. It is through this process that Dolly the first cloned sheep was created (Conrad, 2012). Embryonic stem cell suitability for transplantation has recently been in question because of the instability of the cloned cells. Dolly, for example, gave an outward impression of full health but had many genetic defections (Wimmer 3). The process of therapeutic cloning is ineffective. A high percentage of clones die before or soon after birth with a success rate of between 3 to 4% (Conrad 2012). In as much as there have been a number of progresses in stem cell therapy, there are still a number of controversies regarding the issue. Controversies