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Scientists Claim Organs Grown From Stem Cells
Llywelyn writes: "It appears that some scientists in the United States are claiming that they have been able to grow functional organs (kidneys) from cloned cow embryotic stem cells. They have not yet released details on how exactly they did this, nor have they yet provided evidence for their claims, but admit to being only in the `proof of concept' phase in research. I guess we'll see down the road if this is legit or the increasingly common `Science by Press Release.'"
I've done it, and you can't see my evidence!
Sorry, can't consider it news until we see evidence.
For all we know, they are raving lunatics, or just getting media attention for more grant money.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Maybe...
Pedro Côrte-Real.
This company is the same one that claimed to have cloned human embryos, so we're already aware of their preference of press releases to peer-reviewed journals.
... do you still think stem cell research is a bad thing?
There are plenty of reasons not to release information, mostly monitary, but some less 'greedy'.
5 21 3&mode=thread
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/01/27/213
If some alien intellegence read slashdot, I'd hate to see how they would mark us on their maps.
..___
./...\..Earth:
|.....|.Life exists, and appears to be sentient,
.\___/..yet not intellegent. It is still one of
the greatest mysteries of the universe.
Yeah, we could imagine a cluster of twinkies too. What's your point? Human brains are not very efficient number crunchers...
That the scientists are keeping their data and techniques close to their chest is no great surprise. I do the same thing with my research data when it is an incomplete state, because you can't risk someone with better resources stealing your idea and taking the credit. It is a sorry state of affairs, and really just an indication of how all science will eventually end up. More and more PhD students are having to sign secrecy agreements with the people that fund them. Information flows (of useful data) will end up less than they are now in the future because of this. Information Superhighway, BAH!
Some of use vegetarians don't eat meat for non-wussie
reasons. Personally, I don't believe in eating meat that I don't kill. Why ? I feel that today's society
consideres death-by-proxy to be fine. All part of the desensitization people have to violence.
To me, growing meat in a vat is just sick. If you want
to eat meat, kill something. If that idea disgusts you,
why eat what someone else killed ?
Why is it that you people see the world black and white?
Either all health care is private or it is public.
The so called socialist European nations provide reasonably good public health service but the private sector is available to those who can afford to pay.
The owls are not what they seem
...the fact that /. jumps on any nifty-sounding press release and presents it as science doesn't help.
We need a new category, "Unconfirmed Rumors," for these sorts of news reports.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
ACT is not the friendly non-profit down the street supported by charity and gov't grants and staffed with university-affiliated researchers. The charities don't have this money and the US gov't is trying to decide if it should tolerate or squash these folks and in the meantime is such a slow & conflicted funding mess they're not worth the bother. And academia - they've either lost many of their best and brightest to these shops or are desperately trying to form "partnerships" in order to keep in the loop and when it rains gravy to catch a few drops.*
Rather there's lots of hungry investors with deep pockets willing to invest and get these folks the best equipment and shield them from committees and reviews and university politics and such until they're ready to ship. All these folks have to do is get cracking and produce some encouraging results regularly which in ACTs case is what they are doing.
Were their previous results controversial? Yes - possibly overstated. Is this one - possibly again. They've grown *something*, possibly successfully, possibly not. Nobody knows exactly what yet but that's not ACTs point, theirs is that they've even gotten this far. When they find out if it works then they'll announce that too but they're just announcing all of their milestones as they go along.
So why are they doing this? PR. Not just the we-need-funds PR that so many folks are used to seeing (ACT seems fine that way) but also the Hey-the-21st-century-is-coming-at-you way so when ACT does have something to sell the market is ready to buy. Those nice comfortable theoretical debates are becoming much realer much faster then anyone imagined and it's in ACTs interest to have they and the market mature when a product is availiable.
Finally - why aren't the procedures and details being released? Because this is leading-edge privately funded research worth billions. If the public wants access to it then it can darn well pay for it. No money for uneasy biotech and too bizarre a regulatory climate and it'll happen anyway just without public participation and without sharing.
The Genie is out of the bottle kids. Either work with it to shape it to needs and values at its rate of growth or fail to keep up and lose all control.
-- Michael
* For the computer-centric folks this is the same as happened to CS departments in the 80's & 90's. All of the action moved out to industry along with the silly money. If you wanted in on the action you had to get off campus. Nobody has ethical concerns if Cisco announces a routing breakthrough unlike biotech announcing a grown organ but it's really the same business model applied to a different field.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
As bhudda would say, it is balance. Doing things in extreme is the problem. People really should clean a fish and slaughter an animal once in their life. The next time they think about wasting food, they'll remember a creature died for it. What I find disturbing about the meat industry is the sanitary appearance. People should be reminded creatures die for meat every time they go shopping. In other cultures, the idea of santinized meats is considered wrong and offensive.
The article is rather pessimistic, stating that it's unlikely for the scientist to have duplicated the complex design of a kidney, and that they might've generated something that would produce urine but wouldn't be practical.
I'm more optimistic. A kidney consists of nephrons arranged with one end attached to a capillary, able to access the blood stream, and the other to a duct eventually leading to the ureter. While it would be difficult, using current technology, to grow an exact replacement of a kidney, growing a sheet or row of nephrons would be much simpler and would still be effective.
Assuming this announcement isn't a complete hoax, I believe we're closer to culturing kidneys than the article indicates.
Colleagues have already succeeded in cloning cells, causing them to differentiate into cartilege, and then, using an ear shaped scaffold, making an artificial ear; but only an artificial outer ear! It is basically a plastic surgery technique, the inner ear is too complicated to be made by this method.
coaxed the stem cells into becoming kidney cells, and then "grew" them on a kidney-shaped scaffold.
What he is saying is that he made a kidney-shaped lump of meat out of kidney cells. This is NOT the same as a kidney, even if it squirts out "urine".
Some of these kidney cells have a directional orientation which you cannot duplicate with a scaffold - without getting too technical, these cells are adjacent to two tubes, one tube which carries proto-urine and one tube which carries blood. The cell has to know which is which.
Even if the cells don't know which is which, and if the tubes are there, they might still produce something that looks kinda like urine, just because they allowed the contents of the artificial proto-urine tube to become isotonic (equal in content of water and salt) with the blood. I will say - if what these kidneys made was "good" urine, the people at Advanced Cell Technology would release it's contents in a second. There is no way that anyone could steal whatever trade secrets they have based on the quality of the urine their artificial kidneys produce.
Kudos again to the New Scientist for raising these concerns.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
However, this is a dangerous gambit they're playing: they could potentially raise expectations to unrealistic levels, creating a potential backlash when these claims are not met.
A NY Times article last fall talked about how a lot of key stem cell researchers in the scientific community were flooded by calls from people pleading for nonexistant stem-cell based therapies and cures. The scientists had to explain to these people that a lot of the things hyped up by the press simply didn't exist yet; the technology, let alone the infrastructure to develop these cures, simply didn't exist. At best, a lot of the claims wouldn't be realised for at least a decade, if not longer.
Assuming for a moment that ACT's claims are valid, my guess is that they're still years of from being able to produce custom organs for individuals. Potentially, it could take them years to develop this technique.
And in the meantime, the public will likely grow more and more annoyed as the results don't come in, fueling a potential backlash against aggressive stem-cell research. While this won't stop research all together, it may lead to a dramatic reduction in funding that could set back the field even further.
I know you don't want to hear this.. and I hate to say it, but its capitlism in action and it makes perfect sense.
The disease you describe is fairly rare. Other diseases are not. If the drug companies spend their valuable resources fixing your sons disease then they have less resources to allocate to diseases that have a higher value to them. Why do they have a higher value? Because certain disesases have more customers (read: victims). Aids and various Cancers are examples of diseases that are worth the time and effort of research for the drug companies. These diseases affect millions of people worldwide. They can save more lives fixing these diseases, and make more money in the process.
It doesn't seem fair when life throws a rare disease your way, but it doesn't change the simple fact that this is the most efficient use of resources. When society begins to place more value on fixing this liver disease (presumably because more people suffer from it) then the drug companies will put the time and effort into fixing it, because the profit will be there for them.
It sounds mean and cruel, but it really is the best way.
Turn s60 photos into awesome videos with mScrapbook for all S60 3rd edition phones!
A breast bed!
Just imagine it, so warm and wobbly, and nipples! So many nipples!
-- That which does not kill us has made its last mistake.
However, look at the situation:
Tens of thousands of researchers (yes, including federally funded ones) have been working on cancer treatment, in an effort that has gone on longer than anyone here has been alive. This could be because:
a. Evil capitalist greed is preventing the publication of the many potential cures that are right around the corner.
b. Curing cancer is a really hard problem.
I understand why you're angry enough to guess "a", but I don't think you're right.