Short excerpt from a YouTube video titled "The History of Stem Cells" (Joy Kong, MD) that states the first stem cell therapy occurred in the 1960s via bone marrow transplant. The speaker defines stem cells as cells that can self-replicate (make identical copies) and can produce slightly more differentiated, specialized progeny. The clip frames early bone marrow transplants as inadvertent stem cell therapy before the terminology existed.
People may not realize the very first stem cell therapy was provided in the 1960s through bone marrow transplant. So they were really giving people stem cells. They just didn't know and they didn't have the word for it. And then they realized, oh, we have stem cells in our body, these cells that can self replicate and replenish itself. So that's the characteristic. They can make copies of themselves, so identical copies of themselves. And they can make a copy of something just a little further down the differentiation pathway, so just a little different, a little bit more specialized cells gaining some function.
