Why not use stem cells from adults?
Adult blood-forming stem cells are already widely used clinically to restore the blood-forming system after chemotherapy or radiation therapy. Ongoing research on adult stem cells of various types will likely lead to additional new therapies. But while scientists are devoting considerable effort to studying adult stem cells, they believe that embryonic stem cells offer unique capabilities not offered by adult stem cells that make them advantageous for certain types of applications. Adult stem cells have a limited capacity to proliferate (duplicate) in contrast to embryonic stem cells which can proliferate indefinitely. This is important because the limited ability of adult stem cells to proliferate has been a limiting factor in the treatment of diseases such as Parkinson’s disease. Moreover, adult stem cells are partially specialized and can generally only form mature cells from their tissue of origin, unlike embryonic stem cells which can form any cell in the body. As far as we know n
