Have you ever known or seen someone suffering from a spinal cord injury or with Alzheimer's disease? What if I told you there was a way to cure all of it? There is much controversy over the topic of stem cell research, many think that it is unethical and wrong to kill embryonic cells to help patients suffering from things such as spinal cord injury, heart disease, and alzheimer's disease. In my opinion stem cell research is a good thing, it gives people with these types of diseases another chance at life. There are two types of stem cells: embryonic and somatic (otherwise know as adult stem cells.) The reason why they are so incredible is because they can be recoded into other types of cells. For example they can be made into a spinal cord cell to help fix a spinal cord injury. The differences between stem cells are Somatic can only be changed into a limited amount of cells and Embryonic can be changed into any type of cell. also adult stem cells can be separated from the embryo easily. There is also a big difference where embryonic stem cells are a lot harder to get ahold of and ethical and legal restrictions. Adult stem cells on the other hand are found in small numbers throughout the body, and can only be manipulated to a limited amount of different cells. Adult stem cells don't have restrictions from legal or ethical reasons. (cord-blood-bank-weebly 2009). Stem cells are unique in the way that they can be used for endless therapeutic reasons. There are currently 250,000 people in the USA alone that suffer from a spinal cord injury, half are considered quadriplegic which means they have no feeling or control of all four limbs. What happens when someone has a spinal cord injury is the spinal cord servers and signals traveling through the nerve can no longer make it to other important parts of the body such as the brain and other parts of the body, which causes varying levels of paralyzation depending on the extent and area of injury.