Turns out, an injection of some good’ol umbilical cord stem cells can do you some good. Maybe Tom Cruise was on to something when he said he’d eat his baby’s umbilical cord (not really, he’s batshit crazy).

Umbilical cords are often kept because they contain stem-cells that seem to be all the hype in medical research these days (and an oft brought up topic in politics). The controversy around stem-cells is that embryonic stem-cells must be extracted from … well embryos. But there are two types of stem-cells (roughly speaking), the embryonic stem-cells that can turn into any of the 220 cells in an adult body (and must be harvested from embryos), and adult stem-cells which can be found in umbilical cords (and in all adults really). Most research today is done on adult stem-cells, and in fact there are many medical treatments already in use today that use adult stem-cells. There is no approved medical procedure that involves embryonic stem-cells. A good starting point if you’re interested in knowing more, is the Wikipedia page for stem cells.