The golden era of stem cell discoveries | Una Riekstiņa | TEDxRiga

Una Riekstina is dedicating her life in the stem cell research. She got her PhD at Karolinska Institutet, in Stockholm. Currently she is Asoc. Professor and leading researcher at the Faculty of Medicine of University of Latvia. Una is a coauthor of 17 international research articles and 12 local research and popular science articles. She is a recipient of prestigious L'Oréal Latvia grant for Women in Science in year 2010. In her speech Una explains that adult stem cells are our body's natural resource that renews the body lifelong. Stem cell research helps to find out ways how to use stem cells to cure diseases like heart attack, diabetes, lost vision and autoimmune diseases. Adult stem cells are the medicines of tomorrow that will improve the quality of life for many people yet they are not the panacea for all diseases.

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Today I'm here to tell you

about the hidden treasures of the human body

-- the marvelous stem cells.

Humans are the crowning glory of the nature.

And during Renaissance times it was thought

that the arcitecture of the human body represents the arcitecture of the Universe.

This is a picture of Vitruvian man by Leonardo da Vinci

showing the geometry of the human body.

Renaissance period was the beginning of the modern medicine.

The anatomy of the human body was discovered

and by the investion of the microscope it was studied --

the body was studied at the cellular level

and it was found that cell is the smallest building block of the body.

And we are composed of 50 trillion cells.

Trillion is a number with twelve zeroes.

So how big would be the house of trillion zeroes?

To imagine a house of trillion building blocks.

And in fact The Great Wall of China is built of 4 billion building blocks.

And we -- as human beings -- are 10 thousand times more complicated

than The Great Wall of China!

And it took 2000 years to build The Great Wall of China

and perhaps you'll wonder how long it takes to build a human being?

In an average it takes 7 to 10 minutes for mom and dad

to put two magic building blocks together,

to lay the fundament of new life.

And the rest of the body building is done by the magic stem cells.

I was trying to imagine what would my life look like

if I lived in Renaissance times.

Despite the great progress in science and culture

women were not allowed to study.

So luckily for me I live in the 21st century in Latvia,

where society is familiar with gender mainstreaming ideas and I am a researcher,

so I chose to wear a lab coat instead of that gorgeous dress.

I came to the research lab when I was a third year biology student

and I was fascinated by the friendly atmosphere in the lab.

Respectable scientists were sequencing the DNA

and during the breaks they boiled tea and smoked in the fume hood.

Wow, I thought, this could be my dream job,

so now I have 19 years of experience being a researcher

and during past 7 years I've been studying adult stem cells.

And I'm very of excited about the stem cell potential

and I think that today we live in the golden era of stem cell discoveries.

Every part of our body has some capacity to renew

due to these amazing stem cells.

And I want to understand the regeneration process that occurs naturally

to find out ways how to use stem cells to treat diseases.

How I got interested in celullar biology?

One day I saw a picture in my high school biology book that looked something like this