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US researchers are investigating whether bone marrow could be turned into things other than blood cells - for example brain tissue. All the talk about stem cells has made it sound as if they're something new, which isn't true. Stem cells taken from the bone marrow have been used for years in bone marrow transplants and no one's run any ethical red flags up the pole against them. So, researchers have wondered whether bone marrow could be turned into things other than blood cells - for example brain tissue. Which is what scientists in the US have recently investigated - with some surprises. They obtained brain tissue from post mortems of three women with leukaemia who'd received bone marrow from their brothers. The significance of choosing women with male donors was the Y chromosome. Any cells in the brain with a Y chromosome, were likely to have come from the transplant. They looked in a brain region involved in memory and found a wide range of brain cells with Y chromosomes, suggesting the marrow stem cells had got into the brain and transformed themselves into something else - albeit in small numbers. If this is true - and there are other explanations for the phenomenon - then bone marrow could be an easy source of stem cells for our withering brains.
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