Here is an example of a mother of five who came into a neighboring hospital in Boston with symptoms of hepatitis. She was an intravenous drug user …

(Reported by Robert Krulwich in a recent npr.org interview with Dr. Kirby Johnson, Ph.D. —Researcher from Tufts University School of Medicine.)

 

KRULWICH: And she had had five conceptions. She’d had one child, two miscarriages, two abortions, that’s five in all; she could be carrying, therefore, a lot of fetal cells and they examined her …
Dr. JOHNSON: And in the process, she had a liver biopsy …
KRULWICH: And the doc said well, why don’t we send her liver to the lab to see if there are any fetal cells gathering where she’s got trouble, and when they looked …
Dr. JOHNSON: We found hundreds…
KRULWICH: Wow!
Dr. JOHNSON: …and hundreds of fetal cells.
KRULWICH: Normally they’d expect five or ten cells.
Dr. JOHNSON: But this was a very large–we saw, literally, sheets of cells, whole areas that seemed to be normal …
KRULWICH: Meaning that those fetal cells had gathered at the liver and like stem cells, they just turned themselves, in this case, into healthy liver cells.
Dr. JOHNSON: And most interestingly, this woman did not desire to have any further treatment done. In fact, she wanted to get back to her normal life and be left alone.
KRULWICH: And so she left the hospital with hepatitis but when they checked months later, they learned …
Dr. JOHNSON: That she is completely healthy, no signs of further liver damage …
KRULWICH: So, no medical intervention, but just a huge number of her babies’ fetal cells? Could that lead you to think the poetic thought, that she was saved by her kids?
Dr. JOHNSON: (Hesitates) We want to think that.
KRULWICH: (Laughs) I know you do.

Sources:
Lifenews.com
Kansas for Life
npr.org
Scientific article

This entry was posted on Monday, December 19th, 2011 at 11:56 am and is filed under News & Commentary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.