Every generation lives a little longer than the last — it’s the sign of an advancing society. A hundred years ago the average British life expectancy at birth was 45. Now it is 75, giving us a blissful free decade at the end of our working lives to spend fending off great-grandchildren and watching wide-screen television. The downside is that as we live longer and as doctors become better at warding off death, we pass an ever greater percentage of our lives suffering. Heart attacks, strokes, cancer, diabetes, liver failure, blindness, senile dementia, Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s, Alzheimer’s, arthritis. Whereas we used to fall sick and die off quite quickly, most of us now spend our last 15 years ailing in one way or another — but what can we possibly do about it?
The short answer is to be found in stem cells — the basic blobs out of which every other sort of tissue develops. Since they were first isolated in a lab in Wisconsin in 1998, they have become the great hope of everyone suffering from a chronic or degenerative disease. Every week or so scientists are quoted in newspapers raving about newly discovered stem-cell potential. Only a few tests have so far been done on human cells, but experiments on mice show that at the very least stem cells can be turned into brain neurons, heart muscle, bone, insulin-producing pancreatic tissue, sparkling new corneas. They work biblical-style wonders: crippled rats have got to their feet and walked again after being injected with stem cells (best not to think about how they became crippled), near brain-dead rats have suddenly revived. Christopher Reeve, the paralysed actor who played Superman, has announced that he expects them to heal him too.
On Thursday last week, scientists in Boston reported that stem cells could even cure the menopause.
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