Biology is the study of life, meaning it’s the study of everything going on around us from cells to large organisms. Each day scientists make hypotheses and carry out experiments to make breakthroughs in a variety of fields. My focus today was on the recent breakthrough of the stem cell research that took place at University of Washington lead by Professor Charles Murray. The information I read came from the USA Today article “Stem Cells Used to Repair Animal Hearts and Human Muscle,” written by Karen Weintraub. Karen does a good job giving a little bit of background information on the research project along with the results of the study. Basically stem cell research is used to help people grow cells that their body is either lacking in significant numbers or is completely missing. In this study, Charles Murray lead his team to repair the damaged hearts of seven macaque monkeys. I was a little surprised to see monkeys being the test subject because most of the science related studies I hear about often use rats as test subjects. Now that I think about it, it would make sense to use a monkey to test stem cells on since the theory of evolution suggests that we evolved from monkeys, in other words their hearts and cells should be similar to ours. But back to the study, in this study they blocked one of the arteries going to the monkey’s heart for around 90 minutes so it would cut enough oxygen to do significant damage to the heart. They then proceeded to take human embryo stem cells and change them into muscle cells and insert them into the monkey’s hearts. For the next three months they closely observed the monkeys to find that over 40% of the heart’s damaged tissue had grown back in some of the test subjects. Not only did the cells help repair the tissue, but they ultimately synchronized with the beat of the heart. This was a huge breakthrough for modem medicine because not only was it the first time that scientists used ov