STEM CELL RESEARCH Medicine today is improving rapidly toward the development of more efficient cures for people with diseases. In the past, doctors could usually only treat the symptoms of illness, treatments rarely addressed the causes of disease. Today, many of the cures being developed by scientists are based on highly developed techniques that are able to target the causes of disease rather than simply treating the symptoms. One of those techniques is called stem …showed first 75 words of 590 total…

…showed last 75 words of 590 total…woman's body. The embryos from which human embryonic stem cells are derived are typically four or five days old and are a hollow microscopic ball of cells called the blastocyst. The blastocyst includes three structures: the trophoblast, which is the layer of cells that surrounds the blastocyst; the blastocoel, which is the hollow cavity inside the blastocyst; and the inner cell mass, which is a group of approximately 30 cells at one end of the blastocoel.