Question: How do you make body cells?

Kathryn Thomas answered on 6 Nov 2017:

In your body, your cells split themselves in half to make new cells. Your whole body grew from a single cell, which I think is pretty amazing!

Usually human cells can only split themselves a certain number of times before they die. The cells we use in labs were taken from a human being many years ago, and they tended to be from cancerous cells. Cancer obviously makes people very ill and the main problem with cancerous cells is that they don’t die after a few splits, they just going and going and having all these cells in the wrong place makes people very sick, which is terrible. However, for use in the lab these cells are helpful because it means that they keep growing for us and we can keep them alive fairly easily. Like a pet you have to feed them and make sure they don’t sick, but unlike pets you can actually freeze them to stop them splitting and keep them alive! Please don’t try this with any pets!
I hope this answer was helpful 🙂