Stuff You Should Know - How Stem Cells Work

Episode Date: September 9, 2014

Since scientists realized there is a type of cell that can grow into any other type, they have worked to use them to heal human conditions like Parkinson's and immune disorders. But because stem cells often come from embryos they remain controversial. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Attention Bachelor Nation. He's back. The host of some of America's most dramatic TV moments returns with the most dramatic

podcast ever with Chris Harrison. During two decades in reality TV, Chris saw it all. And now he's telling all. It's going to be difficult at times. It'll be funny. We'll push the envelope. We have a lot to talk about. Listen to the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. That makes the stuff you should know featuring Jerry. Yay. Good afternoon. Good afternoon, Charles. How are you? I'm good. A little wackier than usual by maybe like three or four percent.

Yeah, we're both a little wacky today. Usually we depend on the other to not be wacky. This episode is going to suck. No, it won't suck. You don't think? It's great. Yeah. How are you being optimistic? I see. I think this is good. I learned a lot about this topic. Yes. Thank you for not blowing the big secret. That's right. We're talking about stem cells today. It's out there. Yep. We can't take it back. Nope. Did you know much about stem cells before you researched this? A little bit. I'll keep up with the news a little bit on it, but I hadn't done a ton of research. It's really fascinating. Yeah, it really is. Yeah. What's fun is what I knew about it before, what I assumed, which is just this very primitive idea of

like taking a cell and making it turn into some other cell that you want, and then injecting it into the affected area. It's actually what stem cell therapy is. Yeah. That's the goal of it at this point. Pretty much. Yeah, one of them. Yeah. So basically, it's the caveman's dream. That's what stem cells are. Is that what it is? Yeah. I thought that was warm soup. Warm soup. All right. So after that, after warm soup was invented, they turned their attention to stem cells. Warm soup, then cold beer, then stem cells. Yeah, that may have come first. Sure. You remember from the beer episode, the idea that bread was created to make beer easier to make? Yeah. That's such an awesome idea. I love it. That's a t-shirt right there.

Yeah, it's a little clunky. I think we need to work on it. Bread before beer. Oh, well, there you go. Yeah. Yeah. You thought I was going to put the whole thing. Yeah. It kind of keeps going on to the back of the shirt. Right. Oh, wow, you are in a weird mood today, aren't you? I know. I just like, I don't even know what that was. Okay. Let's take this seriously. Yes. So there are plenty of diseases out there, Chuck, that affect cells. Sure. Like Parkinson's. Yeah. The neurons that produce dopamine, the neurotransmitter dopamine, which helps control movements, those cells die. And as a result, you lack dopamine. And as a result of that, you can't control your movements. And then you have the characteristic tremors of Parkinson's.

Sure. Heart failure is apparently the result of, well, your heart failing. Yeah. But the heart failure comes from your heart cells dying off. Yeah. It's all cellular death for the most part. Well, a lot of it is, right? There's a lot of disease out there. Type one diabetes. Yeah. I believe you're not producing insulin like you're supposed to. Yeah. And the pancreas. Yeah. So the reason why cell death in the pancreas. So there's this whole idea that if you can just figure out how to reintroduce these cells, then the caveman's dream will be realized because you'll have a healthy pancreas, and therefore no more type one diabetes. Yeah. You'll be producing dopamine again, no more Parkinson's, and possibly no more Alzheimer's either. Yeah. No more a lot of stuff. Yeah.

And it all comes down to the fact that we are losing cells in an unnatural way, and therefore by replacing those cells, we can conceivably cure these diseases. Yeah. I guess we shouldn't say no more, but we should say reversible, you know, because you would still get Parkinson's, but then you'd be able to reverse the effects. Right. We're not talking about eradicating. Oh, yeah, yeah. You know what I'm saying? That's a good point. Yeah. We're talking about curing these things. Yes. Once you already have them. I just saved us some pedantic emails. You did. So the whole point to all this, the whole idea beneath it was discovered in 1981, when some researchers figured out that there are cells in mice that are what are called undifferentiated,

meaning they're not really any kind of cell, like they don't carry oxygen in the blood, they're not capable of it. They're not capable of transmitting neurotransmitters. Yeah. They didn't really seem to do anything, but then further and further research revealed like, oh my God, these cells can do anything. Yeah. They're like a little child. Like what kind of cell do you want to be when you grow up? Right. And those are stem cells. Yeah. And then in I think 1998, they finally isolated them in humans because the big problem with stem cells is they look and seem just like all the other cells that they're around until you figure out how to isolate them, which is something they're actually still working on. That's right. And they, and we'll get to how

they can mark these things, which is pretty neat in a bit. But there are not nearly as many stem cells as is one of the main differences. Yeah. Depending on where you look. Yeah. For the adult, and we'll get onto the different types as well. But for adults themselves, it's about one for every 100,000 regular cells. Yeah. And again, like in the blood, that's the case in the bone, you might find one for every 10,000. But the point is there's not nearly as many stem cells, because you don't need as many. The analogy that I guess they made in this article is that stem cells are kind of like the body's repair kit. Yeah. The thing is, is they don't necessarily do all the repairs that we need. Like you can still get Parkinson's and there's not a stem cell that

automatically activates and cures your Parkinson's. If so, then this, we wouldn't be having this conversation. That's right. So the goal of stem cell therapy is to figure out how to take these stem cells and make them do what you want them to do. Yeah. Manipulating these cells to turn into helpful cells. Regular cells can only replicate to be another kind of that cell. Yeah. But stem cells are, they have different levels of what's called potency, which is an ability to change, ranging from a totipotent, which can develop into anything. Like it can turn into a car if it wants to. That's not true. It's like the Wonder Twins. Yeah. It can turn to anything so long as it's water-based. That's right. And then you have other levels of potency, too. Pluripotent,

multi-potent. And we'll cover all this in detail as we go because each one has a different potency level. Right. But I think that was descending order from capability, right? Like totipotent is anything. Yeah. Pluripotent is almost anything. Right. And multi-potent is a few things. Yeah, a few things. Sure. And we have these stem cells, like we said, around the body. Yeah. In different places. And like you said, their job is to basically hang out in their, call it like their host organ or their host tissue. Yeah. Like we're all in the liver. We're liver cells. Right. So you need a few liver cells here. I do. I'm going to divide it. I'm going to divide into some more. And then bam, no more cirrhosis. Or at least it's staved off for another year. Yeah.

Yeah. With the bone marrow in particular, there's a type of stem cell called stromal stem cell. And that one creates all sorts of different types of blood cells because your blood cells, that's how they regenerate. Your stem cells, they don't self-regenerate and they only last about 28 days. Now, is that why you can use cells from bone marrow to treat other diseases, like leukemia? Other blood diseases, exactly. Okay. And that is a procedure. It's actually a stem cell therapy that predated our awareness that stem cells even existed. Yeah. We just didn't call it a stem cell at the time. Yeah. It's a bone marrow transplant. That's what people still call it. Yeah. Now we understand that what you're actually doing is transplanting that marrow that includes

some bone marrow stem cells. It's kind of the key. Yeah. Into another person. And then those stromal stem cells will start to regenerate and help the person who has accepted this donation. That's right. So that happened even before we understood what stem cells were. But since 1998, all of this research has really been focused on, okay, how can we make this a little more guided and laser focused rather than accidentally transplanting stem cells from one person's bone marrow to another? Right. And so what they started to investigate and found, Chuck, was that there's something called embryonic stem cells. And these were the first ones that were like, this is awesome. Yeah. And like you said, they're isolated in humans in 98 due to private funding, which is important

designation because we'll get to all the controversies in federal funding coming up soon. But they are embryonic. They're in the embryo, the fetus, or the umbilical cord blood, right? Which is a why a lot of times mothers will save their umbilical cord or not themselves. They don't just give it to them. They stuck it in their purse. They wrap it up in a clean next year later. Here you go. Because that could come in handy later on. Yeah. And it depends on when it's harvested, but they are the ones that are pluripotent, depending, like I said, on when you get them. They can also very early on be the ultimate totipotent. Yeah. But that's super early. Yeah. You have to have a quick hand to get this totipotent. A day or so, right? Yeah. Old.

So those are the embryonic versions. That's right. Then you've got adult stem cells and strangely adult stem cells are found from infants on. Yeah. So I think the adult refers to the actual stem cell rather than the person who has that type of stem cell. Yeah. I think it's sort of like post embryonic is the way I looked at it. Yeah. Or post birth maybe. Yeah. That makes sense. It is multipotent, which means it can differentiate or change itself into a lot of different helpful things, but not as many as pluripotent. No. And then lastly, in 2006, some Japanese people figured out that you could take English. Were they English too? Well, there was two guys who won the Nobel Prize. Japanese was a sir. Awesome. They both deserve it. Yeah. Because they figured

out that you can take a cell, any kind of cell and make it regress back into a stem cell. And that was huge because in part or mostly because of the big controversy around embryonic stem cells, which like you said, we'll get into it in depth. Yeah. And those are called induced pluripotent stem cells or IPSCs induced because they're inducing it and pluripotent because they revert back to the very handy pluripotent states. Right. Those are the main three that's in general, and we'll talk about all of them a little more in depth right after this. Attention Bachelor Nation. He's back. The man who hosted some of America's most dramatic TV moments returns with a brand new tell all podcast, the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison.

It's going to be difficult at times. It'll be funny. We'll push the envelope. But I promise you this, we have a lot to talk about. For two decades, Chris Harrison saw it all. And now he's sharing the things he can't unsee. I'm looking forward to getting this off my shoulders and repairing this, moving forward and letting everybody hear from me. What does Chris Harrison have to say now? You're going to want to find out. I have not spoken publicly for two years about this. And I have a lot of thoughts. I think about this every day. Truly every day of my life, I think about this and what I want to say. Listen to the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. On the podcast,

Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want

to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. All right. So let's start with embryonic. That seems like the logical place. Okay. If you listen to our in vitro fertilization podcast recently, you know all about how an embryo is formed. We have an egg fertilized by a sperm. It divides, becomes an embryo. It's basically that simple. I encourage you to go listen to that podcast though. It was good. You'll learn all about all kinds of stuff. When you undergo IVF though, like we

talked about in that episode, a lot of times you will have more embryos, not always, but a lot of times you'll have more embryos than you're going to use. And so you can freeze those and save them for later in case you get pregnant and that doesn't work out. Right. Or it just becomes medical waste. You get pregnant. You're like, we don't need those anymore. You can just discard them or you can go with option three, which is to donate them to science to be used in stem cell cloning, therapeutic cloning. Yes. The reason that they would want your embryos is because like you said, they're at some point totepotent and definitely pluripotent. They're very versatile as far as stem cells go. It's not easy. I don't think that's the

right word, but you can take a embryonic stem cell and culture it and let it divide into more and then culture those and culture those. And as long as they stay undifferentiated, you have a line of stem cells that can just keep replicating more and more stem cells. They're never going to turn into a certain kind of cell. That's right. So what you've just created is an embryonic stem cell line. The thing is, and this is what people have a problem with, to harvest these things, you have to destroy the embryo. You have to let it become a blastocyst, which takes a couple of days. And by the time it becomes a blastocyst, it's about 100 cells wide or deep. And then inside this is the embryonic stem cell. So basically,

you have to crack the blastocyst open and then harvest the stem cells. And then there's nothing left to do with the blastocyst. That's right. If you're a religious type and you believe that life begins at conception, then the problem is you've just taken a life by destroying a blastocyst. Yeah. And that's just one of the controversies. The therapeutic cloning is also controversial because that's when they merge a cell. You've got a patient who needs the therapy and they merge that cell with a donor's egg and then remove the nucleus from that egg, replace it with the patients. And it basically is like their own. Now it's not likely to be rejected, which is a big problem. You're just basically using someone else's egg for its structural capabilities.

But the nucleus, the thing that's saying, like, here, build this, go do this. It's going to look like you, not them. Yeah. But anytime you use that C-word. Cloning? Yeah. It's going to be controversies going to ensue, of course. Indeed. But it's also a double controversy, too, because you have to do the same thing. You're still forming an embryo that you destroy once it gets to the blastocyst stage. It's just a freak of nature because you cloned it. It's called a double whammy. Right. So that was, that's embryonic. That's right. And you know, there's a lot of controversy around it. And we'll talk about that a little more later. But there is another type of stem cell that isn't nearly as controversial, if at all. And that's the adult stem cell,

which we mentioned, which doesn't mean you have only when you're an adult. Right. But it's a type of stem cell that it's like the kind that hangs out in your bone marrow. It's, it has a more of a specialized job. Yeah. Or it can become specialized, which is the key. And as you said, it hangs out and it can divide and help out the liver if it needs to, or the pancreas if it needs to. And that's the main differentiates is that it's, it's multipotent instead of pluripotent. It still has limits. Yeah. And it's basically, again, this is the, these are the ones that are your, they're not there to create you, the human for the first time. Right. They're there to kind of keep you from wearing down too fast. Yeah. I wonder if, I wonder if they're left over, or if they're supposed to be there.

I know that sounds like a weird differentiation. I don't know, because I did see somewhere that they're still trying to figure out, although this Japanese research may have figured it out, they're trying to figure out why some types of stem cells, adult stem cells, will just sit there and just hang out for a very long time. Yeah. And then all of a sudden they start to divide. So I don't know, maybe they are original cells. If they're just kind of hanging out doing nothing, why would they age? I don't know. You know, it's weird. So we mentioned earlier that they, one of the difficulties in working with stem cells, especially these adult stem cells, is they look like other cells. So they have a really cool way of, of marking them or what they

call lighting them up. Resells, every cell has a unique protein called a receptor on the surface. And they bind these chemical messages. It's how cells talk to each other, basically. Right. And so they use these markers to identify the adult stem cells. They basically tag them, tag these chemical messages with fluorescent molecules. Right. And then once they put that fluorescent chemical in there, it lights up under a fluorescent light. So they make them kind of glow in the dark. Yeah, because that chemical message is now bound to the only type of cell it's, it'll bind to the stem cell. So then, yeah, when you hit it with the black light, somebody should have won a Nobel Prize for that too. Yeah. In my opinion.

Black light. But it's the same as embryonic stem cells. You can grow these in a petri dish. You can establish a new cell line. Right. And they are extremely useful. And like you said, they're, they naturally say in the liver, create new liver cells. Yeah. But they have been shown known trans differentiation, to undergo trans differentiation. Right. Where they can be induced to do something slightly different. Right. So like a liver stem cell can produce insulin, which is typically produced in the pancreas. Right. And they haven't, they haven't quite figured that out yet, right? No. No, they do not know this. Like they know that stem cells somehow can be induced to do different things. They don't know how to do it yet. Yeah. This is all super

new stuff. Yeah. For the most part. I mean, if you're talking since 1998, that's not a long time. They did recently figure out these hemopoietic stem cell, which is a, it's a type of blood stem cell that makes all different kinds of blood cells. It's a very important one. And they found that by looking at zebrafish embryos, which are totally transparent, they actually watched these things form. And they just found out like within the last couple of weeks that these require what they're calling a buddy cell to become the type of stem cell that forms blood. Right. Yeah. So now they think that they're one step closer to figuring out these hemopoietic stem cells. Wow. They don't know what the buddy cell is or where it comes from, but now they know that it needs a

buddy. So these are kind of like, these are the kind of piecemeal steps that we're making toward understanding stem cells. All right. And then we have our, well, maybe not final, because you've already told us about the fourth, but the third type is what we call the induced pluripotent stem cell. And that's the one that we mentioned was pioneered by Shinya Yamanaka and Sir John, almost said Sir John Gruden. So Sir John Girden. Well, who's John Gruden? It sounds so familiar. He's the NFL coach that looks like. Oh, yeah. Chucky. He didn't win a Nobel Prize though. But for their efforts in 2012, they did win a Nobel Prize. And basically, like you said, they found a way to induce these cells to return

to their embryonic state, which is amazing. Yeah. It sounds like basically they're using epigenetics. Yeah, that's a dangerous word to say too. Well, think about this. So like a cell, what they found is that cells change and become the way that they later become like a liver cell or a bone cell or a neuron or something like that. Yeah. Because they all have the same genetic code in them. Yeah. But then certain gene sequences are either turned on or off in that cell, and that changes or tells them or directs them to become what kind of cell they become, right? Yeah. What these guys have done is introduced what are called stem cell factors that go in and switch everything off to turn them back into these pluripotent stem cells. The thing that they

haven't figured out how to do yet is to now activate them to say, here's some new markers to change your gene sequence and now become a liver cell. Right. You come back to liver cells. I know. I'm fixated on that. Yeah. That's the next step. Yeah. And the great thing about the IPSE is that it doesn't involve embryos. So that kind of skirts the ethical and political side of things. Yeah, because you can take a skin cell. Exactly. And again, these guys are having a 1% success rate, which is not bad. No. But if this other researcher has figured out how to make them at 25 or 30%, that's even better. Yeah. And it's such a new process with the ISPC. They need to do research to see how effective they are in treatment. Right. If they are identical to embryonic stem cells,

or if they just behave a lot like them. So the proof in the pudding will be coming, hopefully, in the coming years. Exactly. Not recent years. In coming years. In coming years. So Chuck, let's talk about how they hope to actually use stem cells in the future once they have mastered these things after this. Attention Bachelor Nation. He's back. The man who hosted some of America's most dramatic TV moments returns with a brand new tell all podcast, the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison. It's going to be difficult at times. It'll be funny. We'll push the envelope. But I promise you this, we have a lot to talk about. For two decades, Chris Harrison saw it all. And now he's sharing the things he can't unsee. I'm looking forward to

getting this off my shoulders and repairing this, moving forward, and letting everybody hear for me. What does Chris Harrison have to say now? You're going to want to find out. I have not spoken publicly for two years about this. And I have a lot of thoughts. I think about this every day. Truly, every day of my life, I think about this and what I want to say. Listen to the most dramatic podcast ever with Chris Harrison on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point,

but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to

Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, so using the stem cells is very important. You can create all these cell lines, and they can live a very great life in a Petri dish. But unless we're saving lives and reversing disease, what good are they? Well, so far, no good. But hopefully what they're thinking of is they'll be able to use these things for, say, like drug trials. Yeah, that's huge because right now what you have to do is test something on an animal and then think, all right, well, if it does this in a mouse, let's try and figure out how it might work in a human instead of just testing it directly on human cells. Apparently the steps you followed are mouse monkey human, unless there's an Ebola

outbreak and then you just go straight to human and get the FDA to pass it. And the mice are like, right. So if you're if you're creating like a heart drug or something and you can induce some stem cells to become heart cells, heart tissue, and then test the drug out on this, you're basically just running human trials right there. Yeah, you're skipping steps, you're saving time, you're saving money, cutting corners. Yeah, that was a negative connotation. So that's one, that is one idea behind a good way to use these stem cells, let them stop living their life of leisure and start contributing for once. Yeah, and forget the drug trials, maybe they can actually, like you said earlier, I think at the beginning,

just inject it right into the heart, let's say, to repair damaged tissue. Yeah. And they've actually had some success with this and mice, again, our understanding of some stem cells and what they're doing is kind of primitive, but they took mice with bad tickers. Yeah. And they injected them with heart stem cells. And all of a sudden, the mice had like super hearts. Yeah. But they don't know if these stem cells went in and re grew heart like cardiac muscle tissue, right? New blood vessels. They're not sure why they just know that the mice, the mice's hearts, yeah, were better. And as they go along testing all these things, one of the things they have to get around one of the hurdles is rejection, like bone marrow transplant, any kind of transplant

on the body really, there's a chance that your body will reject it and say, this is a foreign invader, maybe you want to attack it and kill it. Right. But one of the cool things about the IPFC is since it comes from your own body, it has a probably a greater chance of not being rejected. Yeah. Same with using adult stem cells, they're going to take them from you. Exactly. And use them on yourself. So that's very promising as well. So Chuck, we've been kind of skirting around this issue a little bit, but we made mention that embryonic stem cells do represent a very controversial piece of scientific research because to some they represent the destruction of life. Yeah. And it all kind of

got started with the Clinton administration. In 1995, the National Institute of Health Human Embryo Research Panel advised Billy Boy to authorize funding for research on leftover embryos from IVF treatments that we mentioned and to create new embryos from scratch for research purposes. And he said, the first one sounds good, but I don't know about that second one. Let me ask Newt Gingrich. Can you say that like Clinton? Let me ask Newt Gingrich. I thought you'd ask me to do a Newt Gingrich. I was like, I have no idea how to do Newt Gingrich. He was pretty, he didn't have like a very remarkable accent. No. Especially not for being a Georgian. Yeah, that's true. So that was in 1995. And like we said in 1998 is when

things really got rolling because of private funding. But by then Congress had already put the brakes on it. Yep. Because in 1995, there was a rider on another bill called the Dickie Wicker Amendment from Jay Dickie and Roger Wicker. Doesn't that sound like a British amendment? It does. The Dickie Wicker. Yeah. Probably because of sticky wicket and cricket. Right. Right. Yeah. And they proposed banning federal funding for any research in which you destroy the embryo. Yeah. So I mean, like it wasn't specifically limited to stem cell research. Yeah. But like we said, to get to the stem cells, you have to crack open the blastocyst, which destroys the embryo, which in effect put the freeze on creating any new stem cell lines.

Pretty much. And they've renewed it every year since then. But like anything in the U.S. government, there's all sorts of ways to get around it. And one is the executive order. Right. But Bush came in and he issued his own executive orders, right? Yeah. Which kind of strengthened the existing rules on embryonic research. Yeah. And that's the one where he said you could use federal funds only on those established lines, either the 19 or the 22. Right. Depending on, I guess, where you're getting your info. And it prevented basically any funding, federal funding for creating these new lines. So like you said earlier, I think they were grandfathered in. Right. And the problem with that is, I mean,

these stem cell lines can produce millions of new stem cells within a matter of months, but you need even more for decent research. So there was a, in the United States, at least a lot of, there was a huge freezing effect on stem cell research. It just wasn't nearly as widespread as it could be, at least if you wanted federal funding for your lab. Yeah. And so under Bush, the, I guess there was just, there was still this huge national debate about it. And the Bush administration sided with the pro-life lobby and said, no, you guys can just do this. But how about this? I'm going to issue an executive order encouraging you to go figure out a way to start new stem cell lines without destroying embryos. Go. Yeah. And I guess you can kind of say,

well, then after that, there was the induced pluripotent stem cells. I think they were probably already working on those. I don't know if it was in tribute to Bush's challenge or anything like that. Right. But it did come after that. Yeah. So that was all in 2001-ish. And then in 2005, by the time that came around, the House and the Senate, both even moderate Republicans started to kind of get on board a little bit more, say, hey, maybe we need to broaden this thing a little bit because it's super promising. So let's introduce a couple of acts, the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act of 2005. And that would have allowed federal funding of research on these new lines, not those grandfathered in, only from the discarded embryos, from fertility

treatments. The House passed it to 38 to 194. The Senate passed it 63 to 37. And Bush vetoed that. He said he was going to veto it. It's one of those deals. He's like, go ahead and vote. I'm going to veto it. All right. They voted. He vetoed it. They did not. They tried to override the veto. The House did, but they failed to. And then the Stem Cell Research Enhancement Act of 2007 was similar to the original in 2005. That passed the Senate and House as well. And Bush vetoed that one as well. Huh. Okay. So that was the climate that Obama comes in. Yeah. And again, he, you know, Bush wasn't saying, I hate Stem Cell Research. It's stupid. And I want people to die of disease. He was saying we should only do it in certain ways that don't violate what a lot of

people feel like our, you know, life begins at, you know, that very first day. Right. So Obama comes in and says, forget that. If you have your 19 or 22 Stem Cell lines, you can get federal funding for working on those lines. Everybody that's cool. And how about some new lines? If somebody's going to discard embryos from in vitro fertilization and they want to donate them and these people are aware that these things are going to be used for medical research, then you can create new Stem Cell lines using federal funding. Yeah. And that you're not paying those people. Right. That was the final step. Yeah. And so a couple of, ironically, a couple of Stem Cell researchers sued to get these rules stopped from being put into place. And they actually won. Their case

was overturned on appeals, I believe, who basically also said, you know what this, what is it? The Dickie White Amendment? The Sticky Wicket. The Dickie Wicker Amendment. The Dickie Wicker Amendment is overly broad. And so we're going to limit this and everything Obama just said in as an executive order. Just go ahead and we're going to go forward with those rules. So that's the current state of affairs right now is an appeals court interpreted this 1996 legislative act is overly broad. And we're operating under an executive order that's allowing federal funding for embryonic Stem Cell research to continue. Nothing's really changed as far as the national conversation goes. It feels like it's just died down a bit as far as the volume goes.

Yeah. And they've never banned research. It's just a matter of restrictions on federal funding and use. Yeah. Well, they also didn't ban research on gun violence. They just stopped funding that too. That's right. Remember that? I do. Yeah. You got anything else? I got nothing else. Okay. Well, that's stem cells at least as far as it goes in August 2014. Yeah. Septemberish. Yeah. 2014. I'm sure that in five years, it's going to be a whole new world. Yeah. You never know. We might see the end of Parkinson's and MS and Alzheimer's and just inject some new cells in there. If you want to know more about stem cells, you can type those words into the search bar howstuffworks.com. And since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call

this banana flavoring. I can't remember which podcast it was. Play Doh. But I said that I didn't ever like banana flavoring and stuff, but I like bananas. Yeah. And you were like, what? We got quite a few emails explaining this, and I'm super happy because I get it now. And this is from Elliot. You guys seem to be unaware of why the flavor is different. Currently, we most commonly enjoy what is called the Cavendish banana. You ever heard of that? Yeah. I did. Don't be dumb. I'm a banana clone. Oh, you did? Well, how about that? There are the long yellow bananas people like to have on their Sundays. Before the 1960s, the most commonly purchased banana was the big mic or the gross Mikkel. I guess it came from Germany.

It's definitely German. This gross means big. There are the bananas. These are the bananas that banana candy is based on. After Panama disease, which was a fungus, wiped out large amounts of big mics, most markets switched over to the Cavendish. The worry now is that the Cavendish may be affected in the same way soon. Monocultures aren't the best plan, apparently. So essentially, the bananas that we eat now that we know and love, the banana flavoring that they use is not based on those bananas. That's why it tastes weird. That's pretty interesting stuff. Yeah. And a lot of people send this in. So I tend to believe it because if like four people say something, yeah, it's definitely right. And here's an extra factoid. He says cherry flavors based on

maraschino cherries, which are in turn flavored with almond extract. So cherry flavored candy is somewhat almond flavored. And thanks for the great show. I look forward to every episode. And then it's from Elliot. Thanks, Elliot. Good stuff there. Cavendish Big Mic. I had no idea. Yeah. And like bananas are all asexual. So every banana that you've ever had is an exact clone of its progenitor. Crazy. I'm going to watch that Don't Be Dumb episode. Let's go through it right now. Yeah. Okay. If you want to check out Don't Be Dumb, you can go to our website. But first, you should get in touch with us via SYSK podcast on Twitter at our facebook.com slash stuff you should know page. You can email us if you want and just send it to stuffpodcast

at howstuffworks.com. And you can check out all of our videos, all of our cool stuff, and just generally hang out and be our friends at our home on the web, the clubhouse known as stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. About my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye bye bye.