This a picture of Charis, in the middle of teaching my class about plurepotent stem cells, along with adult stem cells and embryos.
During our conversation, Charis was currently in Vancouver (close to science world) but, she was born in Germany. She has currently been working for Stem Cell Technologies for about 6 months. Before, we started the Skype call, my class got in groups and came up with a series of questions to ask her. I feel that this was a great learning experience for myself and others. Talking with her really helped me prepare for my test and have a better understanding of stem cells.
Some of the questions we asked were…
- What type of diseases can be treated with stem cells?
“Around 80 diseases can already be treated, mostly to do with blood”
2. How do people you work with feel about the stem cell controversy?
“Most of them don’t like it very much, so they choose to use an alternative”
3. Are there other ways to obtain plurepotent cells?
“The way to obtain plurepotent stem cells are through a human embryo”
During this chat I have learned many things including, she attended university in the UK and that is where she got her PhD, a human induced plurepotent stem cell can be formed to make any type of cell and lastly, plurepotent cells can treat many blood diseases.