NY medical schools chart progress with stem cells

http://online.wsj.com/article/AP798ab92b4263471abddc1cb502928862.html
Summary: Recently eight New York Medical Schools have reported making strides in stem cell research and learning about different diseases as a result.  The Stem Cell research in each college was jointly funded by a $600 million dollar state program.  There is a wide variety of progress being made by each school on a number of different uses for stem cells.  For instance, Mount Sinai School of Medicine recently discovered a way to turn regular human skin cells into stem cells that have the ability to become heart cells.  This is important because by creating heart stem cells, the human population will better understand the functions of the heart itself and how it works, which may provide insight to problems such as heart disease.  In addition, the Albert Einstein School of Medicine noted that it had come across a way to create/replicate liver cells that could reduce the need for liver transplant, and contribute to our knowledge and understanding of the liver, and its functions.  Other advances made by the eight schools include advances in blood stem cell research, neurological disease research, and the discovery of a treatment to target and destroy leukemia cells.

Connection:  This article is important to our class, because we have lately been learning about the human body system, and this article can be tied with many of the body systems such as skeletal, circulatory, nervous, and the lymphatic systems. In addition the disease I researched for my human body systems project was leukemia and the article specifically references leukemia and methods researches are testing in order to try and combat it.