The intelligence of blood building

In a recent published report, scientist found that the bone marrow stem cells most responsible for generating new blood molecules follows a flexible behavior. We know that new blood cells are being generated all the time in the blood marrow. These bone marrow cells called hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) in a healthy person comes in two varieties. One type remains dormant and does not change into blood cells during its lifetime. It however change into blood cells when the body experiences a trauma like when the body is subjected to irradiation or a chemical attack. Another type changes to blood cells on a continuous basis but does not by itself restores back the blood balance when subjected to irradiation. These differences were detected in experiments using mouse cells. It is unknown whether human cells follow such characteristics.

If human cells also behave as such, then there is a possibility that a way being found to select the type of bone marrow stem cells and to tune them to differentiate into blood cells when required. We could then not have to resort to bone marrow transplants to save life. We certainly hope that the day will come when all we have to do to increase the blood supply for anemic patients is just by tuning into the required blood cells and excite them into changing into normal cells from their dormant stage. Blood cells are after all born with the necessary genes and if a patient does have a defective cell, gene injection could be perform to revitalize back the disease cells.