Ultimate Stem Cell Discovered

bofh31337 writes "Newscientist is reporting that the University of Minnesota has discovered a new stem cell in adults. It is thought this stem cell will be able to turn into any single tissue in the body." The article is kinda breathy, especially for New Scientist - but if this is true, which needs to be studied more, this will dramatically alter the landscape for stem cell research.

Comments

the best news is....

[Restil]

If you donate stem cells from willing adults, you don't have all the ethical arguments you get with harvesting human embryos. Not really sure which side of that argument I fall on, but if we can avoid the argument altogether and concentrate on the science instead, things would move along faster.

Hopefully these stem cells are as useful as the embryonic ones are.

-Restil

Moral clarity

[DaoudaW]

The article is kinda breathy, especially for New Scientist - but

I hate to disillusion you, but New Scientist is well-known for their sensationalism. If this were Nature, Science, or even Scientific American, Hemo's comment would make sense. Don't take me wrong I've enjoyed reading New Scientist for a number of years, but its niche is tabloid-style, scientific journalism. It is not a scientific journal.

If this research is valid, it is a huge breakthrough. But it means that human cloning will have to be argued for its own sake, rather than it somehow being necessary for growing spare kidneys. My concern with this is that Bush, et al, will use it to shut down cloning research altogether; they've never seemed to have any other use for cloning. On the other hand, it may allow clarity on the morality of cloning.

This is GOOD NEWS

[mcrbids]

One of my sons has type 1 diabetes, heretofore an incurable disease. We have to test his blood at least 3-4 times per day, and continuously administer injections. It's a hassle, it's expensive, and despite our best efforts we know that the inevitable swings of blood sugar can shorten his life, and lead to severe health complications.

There IS a cure for type 1 diabetes - recently in Edmonton, CA they "cured" about a dozen people by injecting islet cells (those that produce insulin) into the liver, along with some mild anti-immune drugs.

The anti-immune drugs are needed because the islet cells implanted are foreign.

The problem is that there aren't enough extractable islet cells in all viable cadavers in this country to cure even 1% of the diabetic population.

Under our current conservative presidency, stem-cell research involving embryos is at a near stand-still. (Only existing lines can be used, new ones cannot be created)

But if these stem cells can be trained to behave as islet cells, then my 13 year old son may well be effectively cured before he turns 20.

This is good news!

Society of biotech patents makes me skeptical

[sam_handelman]

This is excellent science journalism. I'm glad to see the concerns of more skeptical scientists covered in such a balanced fashion. Most of the time, journalists, including those at the New Scientist, breeze past highly important caveats in favor of sensationalism - I'm sure we'll see this story repeated in Pro Life literature, for example, without qualifications. Kudos to Sylvia Westphal (author of the article.)

The fact that the claims being made appear on a patent application instead of in peer-reviewed research makes me extremely skeptical. Showing such a patent application to a member of the press - but not publishing - make me even more so. A great many people (I resist the temptation to post links) involved in Biotech make grandiose claims that they cannot really back up; the huge potential rewards have certainly led to compromises of scientific ethics in the past.

Just because a scientist is fishing for venture captialists does NOT mean that she is doing bad science; it does raise legitimate suspicion about her (Dr. Catherine Verfaillie, who did the work) research.

The "agelessness" and expression of unusual combinations of extracellular markers mentioned in the article are also features common to cancer cells. It is entirely possible that the process of extracting the bone marrow has merely selected out non-tumerogenic, precancerous cells. Such cells, which may very well substitute for stem cells anyway, but probably don't, might also spread through a mouse embryo into which they were injected.