The MAKE blog (best DIY blog ever) is offering a characteristically detailed set of instructions to harvest amniotic stem cells in your garage, that is in the sterile hood you’ve already built in your garage. Some selected details…
3. Talk to the pregnant member of the family (or acquaintances of yours) months before birth, and convince her to store the amniotic cells at home.
4. Consult with her gynaecologist months before birth and convince him to put the placenta under the birth into a sterile flask full with ice. You can put it into Phosphate buffered saline solution (PBS, preparation here) with some antibiotics (Penicillin-Streptomycin) for the sake of sterility.
5. Technical preparations (I did not calculate the exact amount of money, which is needed fro the adventure, but it’s around some thousands of dollars, and that could cheaper than collect the cells via a commercial way): Set up a sterile hood at your garage. You can make one out of a household air purifier, for that see Home Mycology Lab by Philip Ross, in Make Backyard Biology issue, page 102. Rent or buy a normal light microscope (10x resolution will be enough), a centrifuge (1000rpm), and buy a liquid nitrogen refrigerator.
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21. Put the aliquots with the cells in liquid nitrogen and store them. As Charles Platt says in Life and Death at Low Temperature (page 56): “liquid nitrogen is available in most urban areas (search for “liquid gases”), and it is generally inexpensive. It is nontoxic, but must be handled with caution, since its temperature of -196°C can cause serious injury to any exposed human tissue. Always wear heavy gloves and eye protection.”
22. Give the freezed (sic) cells to doctors, when it is needed for repair after X years.
So…there you go. Just be careful not to open that cooler inadvertently down the line. “What’s that?” “Oh, just some of my stem cells.”
This is probably the biological equivalent of building a bomb shelter in your back yard. You’re either the kook or the sole survivor years from now, laughing at the rest of us…
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