I have spent my life
exploring the mysteries of the cosmos.
But there's another universe that fascinates me,
the one hidden inside our bodies...
...our own personal galaxies of cells.
Today, we are on the brink of a new age in medicine,
an age where we will be able
to heal our bodies of any illness,
all because of cell inside us...
...which have special powers.
They are called stem cells.
These microscopic miracle workers
are, however, barely understood.
Implanting them into our bodies could unleash biological mayhem.
Are stem cells magic bullets or ticking time bombs?
Subtitles by MemoryOnSmells http://UKsubtitles.ru.
I haven't lived a very normal life.
Since my 20s, I haven't had to deal with the distractions
that come from being able-bodied.
I have led a life of the mind.
Stem cells may give you that same freedom...
...allowing you to pursue your wildest dreams
without ever having to worry
about the limitations of your body.
Dr. Robert Lanza is one of the pioneers
of stem cell therapies.
He is already using them
to help patients regenerate damaged body parts.
Right now, we're in clinical trials
to try to treat blindness using retinal cells
that were generated from stem cells.
We've also been able to create entire tubes of red blood cells
that transport oxygen just like normal, transfusable blood.
Robert's work developed
from studying how stem cells create
not just body parts, but entire bodies.
They do this for all of us when we start out
as nothing more than a fertilized egg
floating in the womb.
So, imagine I'm floating down the fallopian tube.
And first, there's one of me, and then there's two of me.
Then there's gonna be four of me and eight of me.
And we continue on dividing.
And eventually, when I get downstream,
I'll be a ball of about 100 cells.
These embryonic stem cells are blank cells.
They have not yet become a specific type of tissue.
But soon, they start transforming
into specialized bone cells, muscle cells,
and nerve cells.
Nine months later,
they form a complete person.
Once we are born, however,
these blank embryonic stem cells disappear.
We lose the power that they alone possess
to regenerate all of the tissues in our bodies.
Robert is working on restoring that power.
So, when you think of a regular cell,
whether it's a skin cell, a heart cell, or a blood cell,
it turns out that that cell carries out
a very specific function.
And it carries out that function for its entire life.
So, the question is, what tells that cell what to do?
And that's where DNA comes in.
The way DNA is packed into the nucleus of each cell
determines what function it's going to have.
DNA's long double helix
is wound around a huge number of tiny, molecular balls
in a structure called chromatin.
As we grow in the womb, certain proteins interact
with the chromatin of a blank embryonic cell
causing parts of its DNA to become unspooled.
The parts that are unspooled determine the type of cell this is going to be.
A heart cell will have one DNA arrangement.
A skin cell, another.
This process of cell specialization
appeared to be irreversible...
Until a breakthrough experiment in 1962.
What scientists did is they actually took
an adult cell in the case of a frog, an intestinal cell,
and they put it into an empty egg.
And what had happened is that that egg
actually acted like a little time machine
and brought the DNA back in time to a point
where it could actually generate an entire tadpole
and then, eventually, an entire frog.
Biologists now believe key proteins in the egg
undo all the specialized DNA arrangements in the adult cell.
They return it to its original state...
A blank embryonic cell
awaiting instructions on what to become.
So, we learned from this research
that we could actually generate embryonic stem cells
that would grow forever, that were essentially immortal,
and that could be turned into virtually all the cell types in the body.
Robert has spent the past two decades
developing techniques that instruct embryonic stem cells
to turn into specific tissues.
I think we have the capacity to do all sorts of amazing things
that science never had the ability to do before.
Stem cells are likely
to revolutionize medicine in the next several decades.
But harvesting material from human embryos
is highly controversial.
Some see it as damaging one potential life
to help another.
There is, however, another way
to harness the immense power of stem cells.
Kristin Baldwin is one of a group
of stem cell researchers
who hopes to make harvesting eggs or embryos obsolete.
All she uses is a patient's skin cell.
So, the old way that we used to make personalized stem cells
was to take the skin cell
and take the DNA out of its nucleus,
picking it up and carrying it over into an egg
which doesn't have any DNA,
and the egg can change the DNA
and turn it into a stem cell that has your genome.
But now there's a new way, and all that it takes
is for us to put these four genes
into the nucleus of the skin cell and then wait.
And what these genes do is reorganize the DNA
so that it starts to look like stem cell DNA.
And once that happens, it changes the cell around
and the cell starts to shrink
and not look like a skin cell anymore
and loses its outside.
And over the course of a week,
it starts to look like an embryonic stem cell.
And the only difference now between this and an embryonic stem cell
is that it has your DNA in it.
The four genes inserted into the cell
create four proteins that exist naturally in an egg.
Those proteins appear to trigger skin cell DNA
to arrange itself just the way it is
in an embryonic stem cell.
Kristin was not the first to create these cells,
which scientists call induced pluripotent stem cells,
or IPS cells.
But Kristin was the first to explore
whether these manufactured stem cells
are really the same as the natural versions.
So, an ideal IPS cell or embryonic stem cell
should be able to make
all the cell types that you want equally well
and at the same time, not make unwanted cell types...
In particular, cancer.
But some of the cells
actually fail to make cell types that you'd like
and others can actually cause cancer,
and this is a worry.
So, what we are working on is to try to find a way
to either improve the way we make the cells
so that they're all the first kind, the good kind,
or to find a way to test for the differences
and identify the ones that will be bad.
Kristin and her research team took some skin cells from a mouse
and turned them into a colony of IPS cells.
From them, they grew thousands of colonies
of different adult tissue types.
Eventually, after months of exhaustive screening,
Kristin identified a colony of IPS cells
that never turned cancerous
and seemed to be moldable into any cell type.
So, now that we've made the IPS cells,
we'd like to make them into specific cell types in a dish,
especially those which are useful for us in medicine.
One type of cell that we can't get from people is a heart cell,
so we can see if we could
turn the IPS cells into heart cells in a dish.
So, in fact, when we do this, we can make heart cells.
So that's great.
Another type of cell we'd like to make
are brain cells, neurons,
because we can't get those from people.
And so, we ask the IPS cells,
"can you make neurons in a dish?"
And, in fact, they can.
But Kristin wasn't content with making a few key cell types.
She wanted to put her IPS cells to the ultimate test.
What we wanted to do
is take the IPS cells
and try to make a whole organism out of those.
And so, to do that, we wanted to make a mouse.
What we did is we took the IPS cells
and we then put them into a pregnant female,
and we waited.
And when the mouse had its babies,
much to our surprise, we found live mice
that we could later prove came only from the IPS cells.
So now, this mouse is a clone
of the original mouse that we took the skin cell from.
And it's a way of showing
that the IPS cells should be able to work as well
to make all the kinds of cells that we want
as the embryonic stem cells can.
Kristin's work has shown
that it is possible to manufacture embryonic stem cells
without taking them from an embryo.
But the technique is still very new and not without danger.
As exciting as this technology is,
we know that there is a risk.
So it may not be time
to put IPS cells into your own body.
Rather, we are taking the human cells
and testing them in a dish using as many assays as we can
and ask which tests most predict
the usefulness or danger of a cell.
Before the stem cell revolution can begin,
we need a safe and uncontroversial source
of embryonic cells.
One lone scientist has a radical idea
about where to find them
in a place nobody thought was possible...
inside our fully grown bodies.
300 years ago, my predecessor Isaac Newton
was inspired by an apple tree
to formulate the theory of gravity.
Newton is long gone, but his apple tree survives.
This tree grew from the cutting of the original.
Stem cells in that cutting
were able to regenerate a completely new life form.
They have the same power as the cells in a human embryo,
a power we lose when we are born.
But one researcher believes
that if an ancient tree can do it, so can we.
His name is Marco Seandel
of New York's weill Cornell Medical Center.
He's scouring the human body
for a natural alternative to manmade embryonic stem cells.
The ideal scenario would be
is if we could take an adult cell
where you really didn't have to do very much to it
to get that cell to convert
into a state where it resembled an embryonic stem cell.
You could think of Marco like a talent scout,
searching Broadway for a uniquely versatile actor.
So, we could think of each of these Broadway shows
as a different organ in the body.
And like an organ in the body,
each show has individual actors that play different roles.
And those roles are incredibly specialized.
So, we can't just take an actor
out of one role and put him in another role
or ask a female chorus leader to play king lear, for example.
So it's the same in the body.
We can't take blood cells
and expect them to make brain cells.
And we can't take muscle cells
and expect them to make reproductive cells.
Marco's desire
to find naturally occurring, multi-talented adult stem cells
has left him peering deep into the human body.
Somewhere inside it, he believes,
there is a type of super cell
that's very similar to an embryonic stem cell.
It may be that there's a small population
of incredibly versatile, highly flexible cells
that, under the right conditions, could make any of these cell types.
Marco's hunch was to look for these super cells
in the reproductive organs.
It makes a lot of sense
that the cells that would normally make eggs or sperm
would have more plasticity than other adult cell types.
But there's a big snag in Marco's plan.
You can't tell which cells are special
just by looking at them.
Almost all cells look exactly alike.
It's a little bit like being here in the heart of Broadway.
Some of these actors
might be right for the part and some not.
And it's not so easy to figure out who's the right one.
Let's see what you got.
Can you break dance?
Alas, poor yorick.
I knew you when you were alive.
Can you do a backspin?
Oh.
Keep your day jobs.
After many months
of scrutinizing plates and plates of cells,
suddenly, one batch seemed to show Marco
some unusual talent.
And at one moment, I had that sort of Eureka moment
where I came back and looked in the dish
and realized that these cells, all of a sudden,
were looking very different.
And the way that I knew that this was really happening
was because we got cells that looked like heart tissue,
meaning the cells were actually contracting in the dish.
And sperm cells don't do that.
So we knew that these cells had gone through
some sort of precursor stage, reprogrammed,
and then started producing heart cells.
It was like finding a truly versatile actor
in a crowd of one-trick ponies.
All the world is a stage,
and all the men and women merely players.
Love you like a bad cigar, baby.
Expelliarmus!
You got the part.
After auditioning many thousands of candidates,
Marco and his team discovered a cell
that was able to play any role,
a super cell much like an embryonic cell,
but one that survives in our bodies into adulthood.
This experience was one of those moments
that you live for as a scientist because you don't really know
what you're looking for in advance,
and there are not too many moments in science
that are that clear and that definitive.
Marco's work could provide
a huge boost to stem cell research.
No more need to harvest cells from embryos
and no more need to genetically engineer manmade versions.
I would predict that things are gonna change incredibly fast.
It's reasonable now to tell people,
"well, even if we don't have the treatment for you right now,
we may have that treatment very soon."
This could be the shape of those treatments,
a recycled organ stripped of its native cells,
seeded with your stem cells, and brought back to life.
There are trillions of cells in the human body,
all of them arranged in a very particular way.
It seems impossible that we could ever learn
how to construct a human being, cell by cell.
But stem cells already know how to do that.
Now we are beginning to capture
and control their creative force.
It's a whole new world.
When I was a little kid,
there was a TV show called "The Bionic Woman."
It's not mechanical, but we're almost there.
Doris Taylor is building a heart
from stem cells.
Her process begins with a donated organ...
Which she then turns into a ghostly corpse.
What we're looking at here are rat hearts
going through the decellularization process.
And you can see here we have a heart
that's still red and muscular.
You can see one here
that's part way through the process.
And then here, you can see a heart
that's lost all of its muscle.
If we sliced the heart in half, the valves would be there,
the blood Vessels would be there,
all the rough inside lining of the heart would be there,
but without cells.
Doris' goal
is to transform heart transplants.
She wants to seed a ghost heart from a donor
with a recipient's stem cells and then restore it to life.
If we can use
your stem cells to build you an organ,
then you're not trading one disease for another
like you do today.
Today, you may get a heart,
but you have to take anti-rejection drugs
for the rest of your life.
We'd love to be able to build an organ that matches you,
is available for you.
And that wasn't even fathomable 10 years ago, 15 years ago.
But rebuilding in a dish
what it takes our bodies
nine months to create in the womb
is an enormous challenge.
To build a heart, you've got to bring together
the extracellular matrix, or ghost heart,
different kinds of stem cells, and a beat.
So, we have this flash mob and it looked like it came out of nowhere,
but as you can see, there were actually cues.
The extracellular matrix Scaffold...
The people in white coats...
who are showing the cells where to go.
The different kinds of cells...
You see blue, green, orange, yellow...
They're organized
like they would be in the heart, and they're beating.
Doris and her team have to coax stem cells
to turn into all the different cell types that exist in a heart
and get them to precisely where they need to go.
They're distributed differently
all throughout the heart.
What's in the valve is different
than what's in the left ventricle
is different than what's in the right ventricle.
The ghost heart turns out to play
an unexpected and vital role
in this complex cell choreography.
Doris discovered its pale flesh is laced with chemical clues.
Its different anatomical areas, like valves or ventricles,
are tagged with different proteins.
These proteins trigger
the reorganization of DNA in the patient's stem cells
and turn them into the right heart cell type for each area.
And we can begin to put cells back in
and the cells not only seem to know where to go,
they seem to know how to organize.
And they can start distributing in ways that say,
"hey, I'm a heart muscle cell,"
"hey, I'm a blood Vessel cell."
Then we hook up a pacemaker,
and we teach them to beat together.
And over time, they develop contraction like a normal heart.
Now, we're not there yet,
but we've made significant progress
and gotten to the point
that we can get to about 25%
of a normal heart contraction.
In just a few years,
custom-made replacement body parts
built from a patient's own stem cells will be a reality.
But these two men want
to push stem cell technology even further.
If they succeed,
it would be a profound achievement,
one that would mean a great deal to me personally.
Can stem cells cure paralysis?
Our bodies rebuild themselves every day.
We create millions of new skin cells.
We regenerate our muscle fibers.
Slowly, we are beginning to understand
these natural repair mechanisms and to manipulate them.
But some parts of the body
don't seem to have any ability to repair.
The nerves in my spine have been slowly degrading
since I was in my 20s.
No one has yet found a way to regenerate them.
But Paul Liu and Mark Tuszynski believe
stem cells will help them succeed
where all others have failed.
Mark, I found one.
Oh, let's see.
Okay.
All right. Let's give it a go.
Okay. Let's go.
16 years ago, I had a terrible car accident.
It broke my spine,
and I was desperate looking for medical research
to cure the spinal cord injury.
And that's how I found Dr. Mark Tuszynski.
I write him a letter to request
if I can work in his lab.
So, we met, and I was really struck by his dignity,
his intelligence, his potential.
And so, Paul joined the team.
Reconnecting a severed spinal cord
is like rebuilding the electrical system
of a wrecked car...
Only a million times more complex.
So, this is our cut spinal cord.
And see, we have about 30 cut wires here.
But in reality, the spinal cord has about a million.
We have to connect each one of those
from the right spot where we've done the cut
to the right target a long distance away.
Fixing a car's electrical harness is straightforward.
Solder the cut wires back together,
and the electricity will move along them again.
But in a severed spinal cord,
every nerve below the cut has to be regrown from scratch.
In the real spinal cord,
you have to do this a million times
from one right one going to the other right one.
But all these wires go away.
You have to put in cells here that will grow new wires
and link them up to the right targets.
This is an enormously challenging task.
Paul thought injecting stem cells into the injury site
could automate this intricate rewiring process.
But Mark was skeptical.
And I said, "hmm, you know, Paul,
"people have been working on that for 100 years
and, you know, it just hasn't gone very far."
And so, Paul basically went off and did some experiments
and brought back some results,
and they were absolutely astonishing.
The cells that Paul had implanted, few survived.
But the few that did sent their wires, their axons,
for remarkable distances through the spinal cord.
And this was, in a sense,
the holy grail of spinal cord injury research
to be able to grow axons for long distances.
But both Mark and Paul knew
that getting stem cells to change into nerve cells
and then grow long axons was only half the battle.
For a spinal cord especially, for severe spinal cord,
it's a big lesion cavity.
The key step then, at that point,
was to fill the injury site...
not have a few cells survive at the edges of the injury,
but to fill the lesion sites
so that more cells survive and can send out more axons.
Paul and Mark decided to use a protein called fibrin,
which forms a mesh over the injured area.
They hoped it would create a foothold
for the stem cells to latch on to.
Then this amazing phenomenon happened.
Almost all our graphed stem cells survived.
I took a look into the microscope.
I backed away my chair.
I turned to him and I said, "congratulations.
I have never seen anything like this."
The injury site was full.
It was glowing green with surviving cells
that completely filled the injury.
And yet, more astonishing,
there were now tens of thousands of axons
streaming out of the injury site for very long distances.
And this in the most severe type
of animal-model spinal cord injury.
This is the proof that Paul and Mark's work
is actually healing spinal cord injuries.
This rat was once paralyzed in its front right leg.
Now it can pick up food with it.
This rat was paralyzed in one of its hind legs.
Now it can walk across the obstacle course of this cage.
It's not complete recovery,
but that is a huge amount of recovery
after an injury as severe as that.
This is just the beginning. It show a potential.
We still face a lot of challenges,
like can this wire connect to the right target?
We have good hope.
Mark and Paul have shown
that the biological fortress of the spine can be conquered,
that stem calls can grow any tissue anywhere.
But not everything that grows inside us is good.
Cancer is our greatest medical foe.
Some fear stem cells with cause cancer.
But others believe they are our best hope to defeat it.
There's nothing better in this world for me
than spending a summer afternoon in an English garden.
Here, nature Springs forth a myriad of growth.
But not everything in a garden is a gardener's friend.
We have weeds inside our bodies, too.
We call them cancer.
Just like any other tissue, cancer grows from stem cells.
If we can learn how to destroy them,
we could wipe out cancer at its root.
U.C. Davis Professor Paul knoepfler
is leading the attack on cancer stem cells.
He sees them as the great enemy within,
floating around inside us, waiting to unleash havoc.
We've come to learn in the last few decades
that cancers have two main types of cells.
There's sort of a generic cancer cell,
and then there's these stem cells within the cancer
that we call the cancer stem cells.
Paul thinks our current attempts to beat cancer
are a bit like his daughter Melanie
playing a game of Marco polo.
In our analogy of the cells in the pool,
we have the general cells of the tumor, the red cells.
They're not very harmful.
But the yellow cells, those rare ones, are the cancer stem cells.
And they're the ones we really need to worry about
because they can grow an entire new tumor.
The yellow stem cells are responsible
for all of the cancer's growth...
Good job, Mel.
...just as Paul's daughter struggles
to grab hold of a yellow ball because she can't see
that her friends are moving them.
Keep going.
Get all those balls out of the pool.
So, researchers have been struggling
to zero in on the really dangerous cells in a tumor.
Hey.
All right, Melanie. Time's up.
You can take your blindfold off.
Look.
You got all the red balls out of the pool,
but we didn't tell you that your friends here
had all those yellow balls, which are the cancer stem cells.
And it's important to find those to help cure the cancer.
Paul's search for these killer cells
is not driven by scientific interest alone.
He is also a cancer survivor.
So, I've been studying cancer for a really long time.
And then one day, I found out that I, myself, had cancer.
And so, that was a very scary experience.
When you are a researcher, it's kind of impersonal.
You're studying cells and test tubes.
And then all of a sudden when you have cancer,
it's a totally different experience.
Paul had surgery to remove his tumor
and is in remission.
But he may still have cancer stem cells in his body.
One day, they could spring back into action.
Surgery only gets part of the tumor in most cases.
And so I have to face the fact that there could be
residual cells floating around in my body,
and some of those might be cancer stem cells.
And those could cause the cancer to come back
in a few years or in a decade.
Like Melanie's friends
sneaking away from her as she reaches blindly for them,
cancer stem cells can slip past chemotherapy,
radiation, and surgery.
The cancer stem cells are more migratory
that just the average cell in the cancer.
And so that means that they can kind of
jump ship from the tumor, float around in your bloodstream,
and lodge somewhere else in your body
and just kind of wait there like a sleeper cell
to potentially cause a tumor later on.
Paul is perfecting a way
to detect these deadly cells.
He has found that some of the same proteins
that trigger DNA reorganization in embryonic stem cells
are also active in cancer stem cells.
All cells really have proteins on their surfaces
that are kind of like identity codes.
And what we're hoping is that cancer stem cells will express
a slightly different pattern than other cells in the tumor.
And so, that pattern might be like a signature
for us to hone in on to identify the cancer stem cells
and then essentially zap them and kill them.
And what we're hoping is that will lead to fewer recurrences in patients.
Killing cancer stem cells
may finally bring us victory
in the long war on this dreaded disease.
But stem cell research could deliver
an even greater prize for all of us...
a genuine medical fountain of youth.
I relish the rare opportunity I've been given
to live the life of the mind.
But I know I need my body
and that it will not last forever.
As we age and we make copies of cells,
tiny errors creep into our genes.
This process seems inevitable,
but stem cell researchers disagree.
One of them is Dr. Vincent Giampapa.
He believes our body's own natural reserves of stem cells
can stem the tide of decay.
The origin of the aging process
really starts in our stem cells
because that is a reservoir of the regenerative power
and the ability to have our body cells renewed
and repaired as we age.
The stem cells we have in our adult bodies
are not all-powerful like embryonic stem cells.
They are specialized to replenish
specific tissues we need to maintain ourselves
like blood, bone, skin, and muscle.
As we age, however,
this repair system begins to break down.
What we've learned recently is there is a clock, if you will,
inside the cells that actually changes
or, if you will, ticks as each year goes by.
And as that happens, certain genes get turned off and other genes get turned on.
Our DNA is not frozen over our lifetime.
Our environment and the choices we make
influence and change our genetic profile.
So, if we live in a healthy environment,
that genetic clock is slower.
If we live in an unhealthy or stressful environment, the genetic clock accelerates.
We can think of the DNA
inside one of our body's stem cells like a newspaper.
So, this morning, I picked up this newspaper in my driveway,
and I have a nice, clean newspaper.
But I might drop that newspaper in the street
and it might wrinkle or get dirty.
As the day goes on,
I might spill some coffee on this newspaper.
It might even rain this afternoon.
The key thing here is,
I'm not gonna be able to get another copy of this newspaper.
But as we age, what happens to those young cells
is the letters on that DNA
start to get damaged from normal aging,
from the environment.
And that newspaper or, if you will, that cell
becomes less efficient.
We really can't read the information.
And that cell, then,
can't make accurate copies of itself,
which then rapidly accelerates the aging process.
But Vincent believes
this aging process can be reversed.
His research team at the cell health institute
claims it has already begun rolling back the cellular clock
on our body's natural supply of stem cells.
What we're really doing
is using the proteins from younger cells
from another person
to reprogram older cells from a different person.
What we've seen already in our early studies
is that those senescent genes
that produce inflammatory compounds
and things that are directly related to cancer have actually been reversed.
They've been turned off.
So, that's been a very good sign
that most likely, in the long run,
this will certainly be a safe therapy in the next few years.
In the future, Vincent Giampapa believes
we'll all be able to protect ourselves against cell aging
as long as we have the foresight to plan ahead.
Well, one of the most recent approaches
to controlling the cellular aging clock and the quality of those cells
is to store those stem cells at a young age,
say between 21 and 35.
In essence, freezing an essential part of ourselves,
put it in storage, if you will, in the bank,
and be able to use that later on in life
when, for instance, we might have a problem with our heart
or our liver or our lungs.
In essence, what we're looking to do
is somehow we have to make copies of this newspaper
or make copies of ourselves, put them in storage,
and be able to go back to that storage
when we need them for whatever purpose.
This is not skin-deep cosmetics.
It's true biological youth
driven by the incredible regenerative power
we all have inside us...
The power of stem cells.
Our whole focus is attempting to improve the quality of life we have,
decreasing the illnesses we all suffer as we get older
so we can enjoy the time we have with our families and friends
and really be more productive as we age.
Just as we looked at the sky
to understand our place in the universe,
stem cell scientists are looking deep inside our bodies
to figure out how we can take a step forward as a species.
Within the next few decades, I am sure
they will have developed treatments
that can extend human life by years.
But also, I have to accept
that my life has probably come too soon
to witness the golden age of stem cells.
And so, to those of you who will enter this age,
I have these words of caution.
When physicists cracked open the world of the atom
almost a century ago,
they unearthed a new frontier of knowledge,
one that came with remarkable power...
And grave risk.
As we strive to master stem cell technology,
we are gaining profound insights into the forces of nature that create...
Sustain...
And destroy life.
A brave, new world lies ahead of us.
I believe we will use this knowledge
for the good of us all,
and I hope you will prove me right.