PREGNANCY certainly has its downside, but it may have an unexpected upside as well: cells from the baby may help heal wounds in the mother, even long after it has been born.
It has been known for about a decade that cells from a human fetus can remain in its mother’s blood and bone marrow for many years. But what do they do?
Diana Bianchi at the Tufts-New England Medical Center in Boston and her colleagues recently showed that these fetal cells can transform themselves into specialised cells in the thyroid, intestine, cervix and gall bladder. Now her team has…
