My mom sent me a newspaper clipping from the Washington Post that was really interesting. It was about a group of researchers in Italy who restored sight in blind eyes by implanting the patients' own stem cells in the dysfunctional eye. Can you imagine how cool it would be to be able to grow back your eye? How amazing is that?! And it's extremely successful, too. The Italian researchers tried this on 107 patients over the past decade, and the treatment worked completely in 82 of the patients.
This is what they do: they find someone who is blind in just one eye and didn't become blind through macular degeneration or nerve damage. Mostly the people became blind through chemical burns or heavy-duty cleaners. Then they take some healthy tissue from the good eye and transplant it to the bad eye, and the stem cells grow and divide and fix the bad eye.
It really sounds like something from a science fiction movie. Stem cell research is so amazing. I'm certain that it is going to play a huge role in future medical procedures.
You can read the Washington Post article here.
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