“What do you want to be when you grow up?” is a question it seems like every child gets asked. A few precocious ones might answer “a doctor” or “an astronaut,” but most will probably smile and shrug their shoulders. But well before a child could comprehend the question or the concept of choosing one’s own path in life—while they were an embryo, in fact—the child’s own stem cells were asking themselves the same thing. Stem cells are cells that have not yet chosen a specialized fate, such as to become a neuron, or white blood cell. At some point, each stem cell decides what it will be when it “grows up,” and these decisions are critical junctures in any organism’s development.
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Source: Phys.org