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Unlimited Blood Supply From Stem Cells
Dave writes: "The ABC has a story on some interesting stem cell research going on at the Medical College of Wisconsin. Seems that during their research, they were able to create red blood cells, white blood cells and platelets that were indistinguishable from the real thing."
As is, undifferentiated, naive embryonic stem cells don't have a therapeutic use; they're too dangerous. What this story means is that we've learned how to shunt them down toward a particular cell lineage. We have here the potential to treat a wide variety of diseases; diabetes, Parkinson's, heart disease or many other disorders. This is a fantastic breakthrough; the genuine Holy Grail of medical science.
So, how long 'til someone starts using this commercially? How much do the unrefined techniques cost to make blood, versus cost of getting blood from donors and shipping them long distances? Presumably, blood manufacturing plants would be set up close to where they're needed, perhaps even in the hospitals themselves.
In fact, what do people think of the following model: a business is set up to develop manufacturing of these machines. At first, it leases blood production vats to its customers (first rich ones, then any as production becomes cheaper), using the money from leases to pay for development (including a forum for users of the system, to point out the good and the bad of various models). Over time, convert from prebuilt systems to kits, then to plans that hospitals can license so they can build their own (and with the rest of this plan announced so it's in the hospitals' self interest not to pirate). Then, once it gets cost of manufacture down to some reasonable price (say, under $1000 - in 2001 dollars - for a unit that can supply a small-city clinic for a year), it documents how to build these devices so cheaply and gradually shuts down, converting all leases to final sales. End result: technology is in the public domain, with an established tradition of end users building their own systems from commodity parts, and hopefully developed fast enough that no viable competitors can emerge to monopolize the field.
The only problem I can see with that is fees for licensing patents owned by anyone but the buisiness itself, for instance the university that discovered this process...
I won't get into the moral issues of it, but the last phrase made no sense.
You're probably forgetting that embryonic stem cell lines are just that: *lines*. This means, given an initial culture and the right conditions, they'll grow (theoretically) forever. Also, given how they grow (binary fission), they grow exponentially.
So if you start with one cell and the right conditions, in 30 days you can get (assuming a doubling time of 24 hours) over a billion cells.
So when you hear Scientists complain about there not being enough stem cells, they're talking about quality, not quantity.
I'd be more excited if they could do it from non-embryonic stem cells.
Think about stem cells this way, they're like organ donations. It's kind of sick, but the dead "person"* isn't using them anymore. We don't kill people to get kidneys, we don't kill people to get hearts, corneas, livers, or anything else. We just take the usable parts from the freshly dead.
It's probably disgusting, but it saves lives and otherwise the organs would be wasted. Stem cells are the same way, the research is going to save people who would otherwise die.
People do not have abortions or miscarriages to give science more research material. Get that? No one who would have lived is harmed. We don't kill unborn children for science. These are either cells grown expressly for that purpose or harvested from freshly dead.
* person is in quotes because dead things aren't people anymore.