Foreword

  Stem cell therapy has a long gestation period since the first stem cell was identified in the early twentieth century. It is almost a hundred years that the discovery process passed through different stages of identification, description of properties, isolation of stem cells, and finally the application of stem cell therapy for therapeutic purpose or regenerative medicine in the twenty-first century. One could explain this delay in terms of several factors. It is not only due to the promulgation of germ theory and antibiotic revolution that pushed the biological diseases to the background for a long period but also because of the impact of the II^nd World War and changing state and science relationship. After the demonstration of power that the detonation of nuclear weapons generated and expressed in terms of the fetishism of force that the physical sciences gained greater public visibility and consequently greater funding at the neglect of biological sciences. This was also reflected in the reward system and the discovery of every new particle was honoured with a Nobel prize in the subsequent decades even if it became a routine science. A positive outcome was that the II^nd WW gave rise to ethical concerns for medical research and led to the establishment of the Nuremberg Code for human experimentation to combat racism or Nazi ideology. Finally, this movement evolved into the Helsinki Declaration and several revisions till 2013. However, Science got divorced from values or ethics and scientists started eschewing social responsibility for the application of science that they evolved.

References

Citation

Citation: Bhaskar Vyas and Rajni Vyas. “Real Life: The Story of Stem Cells". Acta Scientific Microbiology 3.12 (2020): 43-74.

Copyright

Copyright: © 2020 Bhaskar Vyas and Rajni Vyas. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.