Katie zucker, l6, Has sky blue eyes, wild curly hair and a dazzling smile. She is a champion equestrian and an A student. Her parents are doting, her friends devoted. So what's not to envy? Well, there's the small rectangular box attached to her belt that pumps insulin through a tube into her hip. To test her blood, she pricks her finger seven times a day. "It's scary," she says. "If your blood sugar goes too low, you could go into a coma." Sometimes at school her eyes swell, and she can't see the blackboard. She knows that her diabetes can result in kidney failure, amputation and blindness. But mostly, she says, "I try to think it won't affect me too much in the future." If there's any hope for a cure for Zucker and more than 1 million other Americans with Type 1 diabetes, the most debilitating form of the disease, it may lie in a revolutionary new field of research based on manipulating human embryonic stem cells. These building blocks of life, when isolated in a microscopic cluster of cells, can morph into any kind of tissue. (So-called adult stem cells, which can be harvested without sacrificing embryos, can turn into only a few tissue types.) One day, scientists hope, the entire genetic makeup of a patient like Zucker could be transferred into a cloned human egg that can produce the insulin-producing cells her body lacks.
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