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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.
The cells seem to grow indefinitely in culture, like ESCs. Some cell lines have been growing for almost two years and have kept their characteristics, with no signs of ageing, she says.
Two years? Damn, now that's an example careful experimentation. Although, I'd like to know what "aging" implies, and if she'd have to wait 80 or so years to see real human aging. Any biologists out there care to explain what aging looks like on the cellular level?
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
One other very promising source of stem cells is from liposuction - check out StemSource for details
John 17:20
Everybody involved in healthcare will breathe a sigh of relief about this discovery. As there are less and less people willing to donate organs, it is time that we get other means of harvesting organs.
D
IF human reproductive cloning doesn't involve the destruction of human life, and IF human cloning is safe (no great chance of abnormalities), what's the problem then?
Anyway, the ability to farm perfectly good tissues and organs out of our own cells would be such a boon to medicine that I can't really see the possibility that it could also be used for reproductive cloning as being that big of a deal.
dinner: it's what's for beer
'Tis sweet... but there's a big problem I could forsee (dunno if the article addressed this... I kinda jumped through it...)...
If we went and did testing on this with humans, how would we be sure to inhibit the reproduction of said tissue? I'm just wondering if these tissues would reproduce the same way that embryos would.
If it did, then it's quite possible that we could eventually replace _all_ the organs in the body (With pretty much the exception of the brain) and thusly we now have a theoretical "fountain of youth" (Any bio nuts wanna call me on this one? I'm not certain how plausible this would be... haven't taken biology in years...). If it doesn't, how can we be certain that growth inhibition wouldn't be lost somewhere in here, and thusly this kind of transplant would end up giving us happy little tumors? Especially if you're transplanting something like a heart, it'd be a Bad Thing to have your heart itself turn into a gigantic tumor...
(Excuse the amateur biologist in me... I'm just wondering...)
Karma: Non-Heinous
Although the majority of new drugs are indeed invented by drug companies looking for a profit, most of the basic science that goes into drug discovery is still done by university research laboratories that get their money from government grants.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Calm down there, brother. In order to live forever, your vascular system, your organs, your immune system, your gastrointestinal system, and your nervous system must function properly. Even if they invent a way to replace all of these with fresh cells grown outside the body from time to time, it would be quite expensive to replace all of these items via surgery. Every third person in the US would have to be a doctor in order to meet the demand. (exaggeration?)
Growing the cells isn't the hard part, migrating them to the proper place in the body is the hard part. Think about your teeth: they grow at a specific point in your life and then start their gradual decay, there are a bunch of them, and surgery to insert 20-30 new ones into your jaw would take days. The problem is the body is designed for a distinct growth phase, and after that phase, certain tissues and structures are naturally incapable of spontaneous regeneration.
I think it would be some time before we move beyond figuring out how to duplicate the growth phase in a jar and duplicate it in the body, where we would presumably only want certain tissues to grow, etc. In the short to medium term, medicine's ability to keep you alive will be significantly increased, but you will be an old person with new parts, not a perpetually young person.
I bet skin and associated connective tissue should be relatively easy to replace, though, so you'll see a lot of actors in their 80's emulating young folks, just don't expect them to be able to do their own stunts.
personal attacks hurt, especially when deserved
Exactly...I wonder if Hemos didn't mean to say
The artice is kinda breathy, even for New Scientist
:)
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.
And this is a great point...it seems like the reason cloning research has been allowed to go forward is because of the potential gains resulting from non-fully cloned results. The bigger question, I think, is this: how does this modify the age-old dispute between unfettered scientific research and constant restraints on that research by people with non-scientific agendas to push? Can this breakthrough provide a clear method to delineate "good" cloning research from "bad" cloning research?
But what does my opinion matter, I just vote here. It's not like I have any money or anything.
I think it's rather obvious that stel cells are eventually going to be conquered and put to wide usage in medicine... maybe in the near future, or maybe in the far future.
Right now I am 22.. going on 80. In my lifetime, I think that it will be possible for people to extend their lives out as far as they want to, if they have the money.
Basically, I see a time where the rich people will be able to remain ageless, living possibly hundreds of years. Meanwhile, average people would live a normal human life span.
Can you imagine what a social conflict something like this would make? In the past, there have been some very large social class differences, but imagine a gap where one group remains ageless, and another is jealously ageing and dying.
I think that I'm going to start saving my money now...
[...]what's the problem then?
El Santo Padre
If you fall off a building, go real limp, because maybe you'll look like a dummy and people will be like hey, free dummy
Another reason to view it as a progressive stance is because, at least in the USA, the whole reason abortion was banned had nothing to do with religion at all. It was banned based on the efforts of the American Medical Association in the 19th century predicated by the new science of embryology, which showed more or less that human life began at conception. This was in contrast to the religious view that the human being did not become alive until quickening, when the fetus moved in the womb.
It states in the article that certain people believe the cells are produced by the process, not that they already exist and are simply refined.
Is it just me, or was there news in the past year or so from people that had found that making cells dormant on minimal media (the same way they prepare cells for cloning) actually made them multipotent anyway? Does anyone else remember this?
toeslikefingers.com - because
Why grow brain cells when you can grow...the Ultimate Steak! Imagine growing meat in a vat instead of hacking up steer or chickens.
While I would agree that one can be on either side of the debate no matter what their religious convictions or lack thereof are, I wouldn't say that religion is, in practice, entirely irrelevant. One of the strongest arguments (indeed, the only real argument I can see) against killing embryos is that they have a tiny soul inside. While I don't believe this, many people do, and it forms the core of their convictions. Most people have no interest in the esoteric word games that the atheistic arguments against the research require.
---Yeah, it's pretty closed minded to not want to experiment on human embryos (AKA pre-born babies).---
What's so special about JUST being human, per se? A human embryo is even less aware and has less capacities in any sense, than a brine shrimp, which most people feel no compunction about killing for completely trivial reasons. Why is the fact that it is "human" genetically particularly important far BEFORE it has developed into a being with capacities far beyond any animal? We might as well argue that a computer disk with my genetic code on it is a living being that deserves human rights.
No space-based expatration system is going to ship enough people off this planet to make the slightest bit of difference. There are 250,000 new people on this planet, ever single day. That is net of deaths, by the way.
250,000 people per day is 91.25 million people per year. According to this slide, European air travel was 541 million passengers in 1998, almost six times your figure for world population growth.