Clinics that offer to ‘bank’ stem cells from the umbilical cords of newborns for use later in life when illness strikes are fraudsters, a top US scientist said. Clinics in many countries allow parents to deposit stem cells from their neonate’s umbilical cord with a view to using the cells to cure major illnesses that could occur later in life. In Thailand, for example, parents pay in the region of 3,600 dollars to make a deposit in a stem cell bank, thinking they are taking out a sort of health insurance for their child. But Irving Weissman, director of the Institute of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine at Stanford University in California, said the well-meaning parents were being fleeced by the stem cell bankers. ‘Umbilical cords contain blood-forming stem cells at a level that would maintain the blood-forming capacity of a very young child,’ Weissman told reporters at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). ‘They could also have derived mesenchymal cells — fiberglass-like cells that have a very limited capacity to make scar, bone, fat — but they don’t make brain, they don’t make blood, they don’t […]