Researchers hope to turn stem cells into specific cells, such as heart or liver or nerve cells.
While some theories suggest that connections between neurons or nerve cells may be to blame for autism, it is unclear if stem cell therapy may help to restore such connections.
This is done by examining the combined concentration of gray and white matter, or nerve cells and fiber tracts, in parts of the brain not normally used for verbal processing the hippocampus and cerebellum, normally associated with memory and motor learning.
These could then be manipulated to create heart, nerve or other cells that can repair or treat disease.
It depends on a recent body of work which suggests that the brain's white matter (the wiring that connects the main bodies of the nerve cells, or grey matter, together) is less dense and less abundant in the brain of an autistic person than in that of a non-autist.
Some experts estimate that there are four billion devices connected to the internet but, according to researchers at the Stanford School of Medicine, a typical healthy human brain contains about 200 billion nerve cells, or neurons, linked to one another via hundreds of trillions of tiny contacts called synapses, that function like microprocessors.
FORBES: Information Overload and the Power of the Human Brain
It is not yet known whether it is possible to generate extensive neuroplasticity in a system that has been injured for a long time and now contains many more complications such as abundant scar tissue, large holes in the spinal cord and where many spinal nerve cells and long range nerve fibres have died or degenerated.
Once they start dividing, stem cells are likely to turn into nerve, muscle, or other tissues--and they stop being stem cells.
For example, fresh nerve cells could alleviate spinal-cord injuries, or newly made heart cells could repair a site scarred by a heart attack.
While it would take several hundred of today's Pentium chips to supply as many transistors as the human brain has nerve cells, in 15 years it should take only one or two of the Pentium's successors to do the job.
That is similar to the way the human visual system works, with particular clusters of nerve cells in the brain adapted to respond to, say, horizontal lines, or to lines that run on diagonals.
应用推荐