Name: 【TED】Susan Solomon: The promise of research with stem cells (Susan Solomon: The promise of research with stem cells)
Uploaded: 2017-12-09T04:12:14.000Z
Duration: 14 min 59 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Translator: Joseph Geni Reviewer: Morton Bast

Adverbs of degree

and they're pluripotent, which means they can morph into

Soon, we actually will be able to use stem cells

to replace cells that are damaged or diseased.

But that's not what I want to talk to you about,

extraordinary things that we are doing with stem cells

our ability to understand why we get sick,

I truly believe that stem cell research is going to allow

our children to look at Alzheimer's and diabetes

and other major diseases the way we view polio today,

So here we have this incredible field, which has

until the birth of a healthy baby, Louise,

this field has been under siege politically and financially.

Critical research is being challenged instead of supported,

and we saw that it was really essential to have

private safe haven laboratories where this work

we started the New York Stem Cell Foundation Laboratory

so that we would have a small organization that could

What we saw very quickly is the world of both medical

research, but also developing drugs and treatments,

is dominated by, as you would expect, large organizations,

but in a new field, sometimes large organizations

really have trouble getting out of their own way,

and sometimes they can't ask the right questions,

and there is an enormous gap that's just gotten larger

between academic research on the one hand

and pharmaceutical companies and biotechs

that are responsible for delivering all of our drugs

and many of our treatments, and so we knew that

to really accelerate cures and therapies, we were going

new technologies and also a new research model.

Because if you don't close that gap, you really are

We've spent the last couple of years pondering this,

making a list of the different things that we had to do,

that actually can generate thousands and thousands of

genetically diverse stem cell lines to create

a global array, essentially avatars of ourselves.

And we did this because we think that it's actually going

to allow us to realize the potential, the promise,

of all of the sequencing of the human genome,

but it's going to allow us, in doing that,

to actually do clinical trials in a dish with human cells,

not animal cells, to generate drugs and treatments

that are much more effective, much safer,

So let me put that in perspective for you

were first identified, and just nine years later,

a group of scientists in Japan were able to take skin cells

and reprogram them with very powerful viruses

to create a kind of pluripotent stem cell

This was really an extraordinary advance, because

although these cells are not human embryonic stem cells,

they are terrific to use for modeling disease

So a few months later, in 2008, one of our scientists

built on that research. He took skin biopsies,

ALS, or as you call it in the U.K., motor neuron disease.

that I've just told you about, and then he turned those

IPS cells into the motor neurons that actually

So basically what he did was to take a healthy cell

and he recapitulated the disease over and over again

because it was the first time that we had a model

of a disease from a living patient in living human cells.

And as he watched the disease unfold, he was able

to discover that actually the motor neurons were dying

in the disease in a different way than the field

had previously thought. There was another kind of cell

and contributing to the death of these motor neurons,