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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
Oh no! Extracting and growing these cells to cure diseases would be like killing millions and millions of clones of yourself! It's like having a million abortions, or even worse, committing suicide a million times over! We must ban research immediately! If God had wanted us to be healed, He wouldn't have let us get sick in the first place!
One other very promising source of stem cells is from liposuction - check out StemSource for details
John 17:20
The tests seem to hold promise, but it is not confirmed yet. But if it works... ooh, the excitement. 'Free' stem cells, with no issues about embryos and cloning is a dream come true to scientists working in this field.
I wonder how long before practical applications of this research become available... five years? Ten?
Raven
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
How many evil companies would even bother discovering things if they could not be pantented? Do you think new drugs just grow on trees?
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
When will the Christians of the world wake up and realize that their "moral standards" are seriously fucked up?
Care to share your definitions of "Christians", "moral standards", and "fucked up" with the class? Or am I also feeding a troll, here?
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
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
Play with my webcams and lights here
If this pans out to be what they think they have, I just hope that the patent holders do not charge and arm and a leg for the world to use it. Sure growing organs and such is a longs ways off, but the potential is astounding. Some discoveries should belong to the public domain, like cures and other medical discoveries. And I understand that research costs money, but maybe we as a society would be better off if governments not spend so much on space when there are so many worthwhile medical research programs that arin dire need of funding. And if the governments fund it, then the knowledge could be public.
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable" - JFK
Forgive me for pointing out the obvious but this is good for several reasons. The one I'm most pleased with is the moral aspect. Assuming this is true we no longer need to farm embryonic humans for stem cells. We can gather them (and possibly in a superior form) from consenting adults.
This may also help compatibility. If there were any problems with a replacement organ for example then this would possibly lessen the chances of rejection.
Of course this still leaves moral controversy over what is done with these stem cells - I mean, that whole human cloning thing.
I can't spell or type, but that doesn't mean I'm unusually stupid.
One of the exiting possibilities stem cell research is someday we may be able to make better replacement organs without horking the immune system, understand aging (and someday doing something about it), or any of the pure research that a baseline cell could offer.. It is still way out there, but this nicely side steps most of the religious/ethical/what about the children political nonsense we have with the embryo-based stem cells. Woot! Just getting past the BS is worth a noble prize in my eyes...
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
This could put a whole new twist on toys in the genre of Sea Monkeys and Chia pets. Can I grow my boss or my professor in a petri dish and then torture them without any legal ramifications?
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
What country do you live in that doesn't allow ADULT stem-cell research? Go ahead, do the research yourself in your garage...it's legal.
I just think it's funny that they are, after a fashion, patenting a part of my body.
psmylie's dictionary: Godzillion (noun) Any number large enough to destroy Tokyo
Do you think new drugs just grow on trees?
Some of them do.
REUTERS, MARCH 5 The University of Minnesota has been granted a patent for what it calls 'The Ultimate [human] Stem Cell'.
It is now illegal for humans to generate this cell, or invoke its capabilities to develop into any human tissue, without a license from the University of Minnesota.
Expectant mothers and fathers, upon confirmation of pregnancy, will be asked to sign a Universal Stem Cell End User License Agreement, and pay an annual license fee.
Healing of disease, and repair of damaged body tissues, will incur special levies.
Any use of Universal Stem Cells in any bodily function will result in substantial fines, possible jail terms, and compulsory MRI scans and biopsies for the forced removal of offending cells from the bodies of perpetrators.
You have been warned!
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
For a first shot, not too bad, eh?
As for my statement about fucked up standards, I believe I'm entitled to express that opinion. It might do some good to read "Why I Am Not A Christian," a collection of essays by Bertrand Russell. You don't have to agree with it -- but why not read it?
http://www.micab.umn.edu/faculty/Verfaillie.html
m d= Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=11458512&dopt=Abstrac t
and an abstract of one stem cell paper is at
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?c
"others think the selection process actually creates the MAPCs.
.with no signs of ageing" could herald this find as biomedical fountain of youth, the raoyalties could be astronomical, especially when used for non-life-threatening conditions.
I don't think there is 'a cell' that is lurking there that can do this. I think that Catherine has found a way to produce a cell that can behave this way," says Neil Theise of New York University Medical School.
If this turns out to be the case rather than the cell naturally occurring in bone marrow, it has tremendous implications from a patent perspective. Since you cannot patent a naturally occuring object, anyone who could reverse engineer the selection process would be able to produce these cells. But if it is the process itself that transforms otherwise non stem-cell behaving cells into MAPC's then process itself would be patentable and I believe even if you reverse engineered it you would be expected pay royalties. Since claims like "cell lines have been growing for almost two years . .
WOW, who would have thought that the fountain of youth, and a source of infinite free power would be announced on the same day?
Work for Change & GET PAID!
I claim Prior art!
A stem cell has been found in adults that can turn into every single tissue in the body. It might turn out to be the most important cell ever discovered.
Until now, only stem cells from early embryos were thought to have such properties. If the finding is confirmed, it will mean cells from your own body could one day be turned into all sorts of perfectly matched replacement tissues and even organs.
If so, there would be no need to resort to therapeutic cloning - cloning people to get matching stem cells from the resulting embryos. Nor would you have to genetically engineer embryonic stem cells (ESCs) to create a "one cell fits all" line that does not trigger immune rejection. The discovery of such versatile adult stem cells will also fan the debate about whether embryonic stem cell research is justified.
"The work is very exciting," says Ihor Lemischka of Princeton University. "They can differentiate into pretty much everything that an embryonic stem cell can differentiate into."
Remarkable findings
The cells were found in the bone marrow of adults by Catherine Verfaillie at the University of Minnesota. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and though the team has so far published little, a patent application seen by New Scientist shows the team has carried out extensive experiments.
These confirm that the cells - dubbed multipotent adult progenitor cells, or MAPCs - have the same potential as ESCs. "It's very dramatic, the kinds of observations [Verfaillie] is reporting," says Irving Weissman of Stanford University. "The findings, if reproducible, are remarkable."
At least two other labs claim to have found similar cells in mice, and one biotech company, MorphoGen Pharmaceuticals of San Diego, says it has found them in skin and muscle as well as human bone marrow. But Verfaillie's team appears to be the first to carry out the key experiments needed to back up the claim that these adult stem cells are as versatile as ESCs.
Verfaillie extracted the MAPCs from the bone marrow of mice, rats and humans in a series of stages. Cells that do not carry certain surface markers, or do not grow under certain conditions, are gradually eliminated, leaving a population rich in MAPCs. Verfaillie says her lab has reliably isolated the cells from about 70 per cent of the 100 or so human volunteers who donated marrow samples.
Indefinite growth
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.
Given the right conditions, MAPCs can turn into a myriad of tissue types: muscle, cartilage, bone, liver and different types of neurons and brain cells. Crucially, using a technique called retroviral marking, Verfaillie has shown that the descendants of a single cell can turn into all these different cell types - a key experiment in proving that MAPCs are truly versatile.
Also, Verfaillie's group has done the tests that are perhaps the gold standard in assessing a cell's plasticity. She placed single MAPCs from humans and mice into very early mouse embryos, when they are just a ball of cells. Analyses of mice born after the experiment reveal that a single MAPC can contribute to all the body's tissues.
MAPCs have many of the properties of ESCs, but they are not identical. Unlike ESCs, for example, they do not seem to form cancerous masses if you inject them into adults. This would obviously be highly desirable if confirmed. "The data looks very good, it's very hard to find any flaws," says Lemischka. But it still has to be independently confirmed by other groups, he adds.
Fundamental questions
Meanwhile, there are some fundamental questions that must be answered, experts say. One is whether MAPCs really form functioning cells.
Stem cells that differentiate may express markers characteristic of many different cell types, says Freda Miller of McGill University. But simply detecting markers for, say, neural tissue does not prove that a stem cell really has become a working neuron.
Verfaillie's findings also raise questions about the nature of stem cells. Her team thinks that MAPCs are rare cells present in the bone marrow that can be fished out through a series of enriching steps. But others think the selection process actually creates the MAPCs.
"I don't think there is 'a cell' that is lurking there that can do this. I think that Catherine has found a way to produce a cell that can behave this way," says Neil Theise of New York University Medical School.
19:00 23 January 02
From the article:
The cells were found in the bone marrow of adults by Catherine Verfaillie at the University of Minnesota. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and though the team has so far published little, a patent application seen by New Scientist shows the team has carried out extensive experiments.
Tough luck. It is already being patented.
If this turns out to be true, it would be a remarkable find. But as the article points out, this is only a preliminary report, and "the team has so far published little." They will need to carry out extensive tests and publish a lot more research before anything conclusive can be determined.
It is interesting, but I wish researchers wouldn't jump the gun and announce "findings" before research is complete. (Cold fusion, anyone?)
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.
Yet more evidence that we will have the ability to make ourselfs immortal in this lifetime. Well, at least the rich will be able to live forever. This is the kind of research I would be investing in if I had more then pocket change.
[note: bitchslap comming]
but if this is true, which needs to be studied more,
Needs to be studied more? Of course it does. Who ever said they weren't going to?
Thank you for the wonderful insight. If it's true there will be more research than, well, you can shake a chromosome at. If it's false... who cares?
Get your Unix fortune now!
"Yes, I only need a few more aborted fetus' and my stem cells would have cloned me my own Shakeys Pizza !"
<controversial opinion>Thank the pro-life contingent for this. Yes, them. Because of the hard-line stance of many people that human life shouldn't be devalued through experimentation, there is naturally going to be a lot more research into finding adult cells that do not have the controversy attached.
Sometimes sticking to principles and not taking the easy ways out (e.g., manufacturing embryoes for experimentation) leads to very nice results.
</controversial opinion>
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
'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
I have to second that. [mee too!]
I'm someone who relies on drugs everyday. If they weren't doing it in part for the money there would be no reason for them to continue.
I think medicine-for-profit is bad, and has denied me a lot of treatment I could have received thus far. The other half if the non-doctors making medical decisions [read: HMO].
Medicine-for-profit isn't good, but it's better than no medicine at all. Many drug companies are making moves to offer even their most expensive drugs to seniors for a low flat rate cost.
They do spend billions, if not trillions on reaserch. If they didn't, no one else would.
Get your Unix fortune now!
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.
They're applying for a patent on the extraction and enrichment process, not the cells themselves, folks. Stem cells can't be patented, because the host person could simply claim prior use and blow the patent.
Virg
http://www.nature.com/nsu/990114/990114-6.html
Get your Unix fortune now!
More to the point, who cares? If I'm 45, and have 20 years' worth of use in my current cells, I can just have a bunch frozen and new organs grown from the frozen batch whenever my new parts wear out.
So what if my replacement tires are only warranted for 20,000 miles instead of the original manufacturer's 100,000 miles? I'll just grow another set after every fourth oil change.
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
First off, if the pun was intentional, very good work. Second, the work would be in the public domain. They're trying to patent their extraction and enrichment process, not the research itself. Third, your logic about cutting off funding for one type of science to push it to another has two main flaws:
1.) Reducing funding for space does not necessarily translate to extending funding for medical research.
2.) What if the next big medical discovery happens in the space program? There are so many examples of this that I could go on for days, but in the "pure" sciences (as opposed to applied sciences) very often discoveries are made from which the benefit is not readily apparent, but it soon becomes something that changes the world. Perhaps the cure for cancer comes from experiments done with materials in zero-G or vacuum environments. There's no way to know, so artificially limiting venues of research because they don't have obvious connections to a particular cause is very short-sighted.
Virg
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!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
What? Like Bananadine?
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.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
Nope. While they can't patent a naturally occuring object (I think), they most definately can patent the selection process. Reverse Engineering would definately still be a violation of the patent. Now if they could come up with a *different* process that could still extract the cells in question, that *might* not be a violation of the patent (depending on the exact wording of the patent and the similarities between the processes).
Reverse engineering allows you to get around trade secrets, not patents.
Posit:
This process works, exact replicas of human organs can be grown and implanted into patients with phenominal success.
Effect:
Millions of americans decide that quitting smoking, losing weight, and all manner of healthy activity are not worth the trouble because science can simply cure them.
Result:
Health care costs skyrocket. General levels of health decrease.
So I ask...how would we prevent this? Make smokers pay for thier own lung transplants? Alcholoics pay for their own liver?
It makes for an interesting question.
I can have a second penis. Thank you science!
"What is the sound of one belly slapping?"
What I got from the article was that the voltmeter showed a 48.9V at load, then the machine ran for a while and was turned off, and then it showed 51.2V under the original load. But with more emphasis on description of what a layman saw than on explanation of what was going on, differing understandings are to be expected.
The thing about 3 100W bulbs pulling 4.5kW is obviously crap. I wonder if that's what the man said, or what the journalist thought he understood.
Oh well, if we never hear about it again, we'll know the answer.
Don Negro
Perl 6 will give you the big knob. -- Larry Wall
Next thing you know, someone will apply for a Nobel Prize because of the momentous discovery that his "dead" flashlight "works" for a few seconds after being turned off for a few minutes.
Well, I don't think that meets the qualifications for a Nobel Prize, but they could probably get a patent on the process.
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
Good point. I think your hypo will occur and millions of Americans (and ROTW) will reward their poor lifestyle decisions with expensive medical fixes, leading to skyrocketing medical/insurance costs. Meanwhile, millions of other Americans are consciously choosing healthy lifestyles not only for the benefits of reduced frequency of illness and reduced medical/insurance costs, but for the benefit of feeling better 24 hours a day.
I think the gap between the two will widen and become more obvious. Hopefully, the problem will beget its own solution as people abandon the endless cycle (well, endless until death...) of bad lifestyle decision followed by painful/expensive medical procedures/drugs and complications, and seek a lifestyle that benefits the body and mind with maximum health and enjoyment.
"What is the sound of one belly slapping?"
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...
Congress could of course set more restrictive limits to patents on things like this if they choose. Remember, the constitution merely gives congress the right to make laws concerning the arts. So, if they want to cap royalties or something, they could. Assuming you could get people to vote for it....its interesting that despite all the talk from some members of congress about drug companies charging too much, not giving poor nations AIDS medecine etc. that no one has tried to just legislate that they cant...
I just got out of a colloqium presented by one of the researchers and she was careful to point out that they do not have cells that can fully differentiate, just that they have cells that they have *so far* been able to turn into anything they want. They haven't tried everything yet.
Not "When will the Christians of the world wake up and realize that their 'moral standards' are seriously fucked up?" but "when will the religious people of the world wake up and find the difference between 'moral' and 'traditional'?"
Generally, "moral" really means "we have always done it that way".
Of course, tradition is also an important way of keeping a society working. Social tradition is really a set of protocols, just like TCP/IP in computer networks. But we all must agree on procedures for changing obsolete details in old protocols. Just remember to consider all ethical details (as in "avoid needless suffering") as well as technical issues when you discuss the changes.
While this would be an amazing breakthrough, the donation problem would still exist. See, as a diabetic (Type I), growing a replacement pancreas from my own DNA won't help me. The replacement would be just as broken and useless as the one currently propping up my liver (or holding it down, I'm terrible at anatomy). The only thing I get out of this research is plenty of free pancreas-shaped paperweights. ("What a lovely doorstop!" "Thanks, grew it myself.")
I would need one of the super stem cells from somebody with a working pancreas in order to grow a working one of my own. Presumably this wouldn't suffer from the usual tissue rejection problems of transplants.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
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.
Some ageless cells are cancer.
...), but they aren't automatically cancerous.
Some are the sources of sperm and ova.
Some are probably the source of the blood, villi, skin, etc. (Yes, there are cells that aren't totipotent that are the sources here, but they don't have any obvious aging built in.)
If there are a few totipotent stem cells in an adult, it wouldn't be any big surprise. There probably won't be many of them, as they would be (are?) quite dangerous (one little mutation and
.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
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.
Unfortunately, some embryos were already slain in the headlong rush for knowledge deprived of ethics
To the best of my knowledge there are no known cases of embryos "slain" for the purpose of gathering stem cells. As far as I can tell it has always been the case of harvesting cells from medical waste on the way to the incinerator. They've been recycling their trash. Very Green of them, don't ya think?
now we find that there are viable alternatives to mass-murder.
There is? You mean thousands of GoodChrisianWomen have volunteered to have all this medical waste implanted, and carry it to term? Truely a minor sacrifice compared to allowing someone be thrown in an incinerator and burned alive.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
This fits this criterion!
I could very well be wrong, but I have studied this a little. You can't recover from a severe enough CNS injury - the reason that some people can show improvement is that existing neurons will attempt to grow to reach other neurons, creating new connections. And when some connections survive a trauma, a person can (tortuously) re-learn tasks using the existing connections (essentially remapping brain to body connections).
Anyway, i'm no MD. But I am fairly certain that one doesn't re-grow neurons when recovering from a CNS injury (although I've heard of research where they found adult brains do have new neurons in them. The wonder of science). However, I'm pretty sure you're right that adults have stem cells - only they're not completely undifferentiated like embryonic stem cells or the ones supposedly discovered/created in the above article.
A: None. The Universe spins the bulb, and the Zen master merely stays out of the way.
Well, maybe not "Now", but when you have an isolated cell, you have a cell that you can modify the genes of. Just change that particular part of the code. (Think of it as debugging.)
...
Perhaps a plasmid would be good enough. That would make things simpler. But even if the nucleotide sequence needed to be altered this isn't impossible. Then you grow the pancreas (lots of work to do to make this work, too) from the repaired cells. Now you have a pancreas without the original defect.
This works unless the defect is in the immune system rather than in the pancreas. In that case there is a need to purge the immune system of the sensitized cells. Ugh! But progress is occuring on that front, too.
In either case, once a few major problems are solved (including how to pay for all this)
One of the big benefits of the ban on human cloning is that the process isn't really ready. There's too much ancillary work that needs to be done. And there was never a ban on the cloning of chimpanzees or gorillas, which are so close to human that all major processes are the same, anyway. (Well, people are cheaper, and rightly so! But pigs are pretty cheap, and monkeys aren't too bad, and are pretty close.)
.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Claiming that unnatural implies immoral is the one of the oldest ethical fallacies still in use. It has been used during the dark ages and most likely it has even been used by such lovely governments as the Taliban.
Lets do a little reductio ad absurdum. The only natural form of transportation for a human is to use your legs, arms, etc to move about. From this we see that using a car as a means of transportation is unnatural. Therefore, using a car is immoral.
Not only that, but any form of artificial insemenation or stuff like test tube (petri dish) conception is by definition unnatural and therefore immoral.
Modern medicine in and of itself is immoral. I mean, you are "playing god" by giving people drugs that make them live longer.
Computers are unnatural and therefore immoral. We are practically playing god by making this virtual world we call cyberspace.
The entire field of artificial intelligence is immoral.
Just because people are ignorant or even stupid does not mean that you should work within their incorrect ethical system and its silly moral boundries.