Question: what is the greatest discovery you have found todo with stem reaserch

Sharon Sneddon answered on 24 Mar 2011:

HI Kpb3000,
My best discovery was a few years ago when I got a donated egg from a patient that was having IVF treatment, the egg was “arrested” so it was stuck at the wrong stage of development and was not growing as it should. We were unable to use this egg for IVF treatment as it would not have developed into a healthy embryo so the patient said we could use it for stem cell research.
I gave the cell 3 different chemicals and it started to divide. It would still not have been able to be used for her treatment as it would never have developed into a normal baby due to the chemicals we used, but I was able to get it to divide into 100 cells after about 5 days.

I then cut the inner cells out and put them in a dish and I left it in the incubator for 5 days. These were really long days as I was not allowed to peek to see what was happening! After this, I did look and was so excited as the cells had started to grow! This was my first ever stem cell line, and it was the first in this country to be grown in this method. The cells then got sent on a plane to Edinburgh where they kept on looking after them until we had lots of cells. We gave the stemcell line a name of RCMAN-1 which stands for Roslin – Manchester1and it was Manchesters first ever stem cell line. We have gone on to do lots of experiments with it, including growing cartilage cells and any scientist in the world can ask us for the cells and they too can use them!
It was really exciting for me as a scientist as I never thought I\d get to do anything like this!