Baby Teeth Are A Source Of Stem Cells

Makarand writes "A pediatric dentist at the National Institutes of Health has found that baby teeth can be a rich source of stem cells. Just like the stem cells found in embryos from which all organs arise, the stem cells in baby teeth could be encouraged to grow into nerve cells, fat cells and the precursors to tooth cells. This alternative approach to harvesting stem cells from baby teeth could help researchers to bypass the moral debate over using embryonic stem cells for research."

Comments

The world today....

[pnjman]

Time to replace the tooth fairy with the multi-billion dollar medical companies.

Re:The world today....

[stefanlasiewski]

Bah, it's time to find the tooth fairy and find out what's she's been doing with your teeth all these years.

Man, she's been running this racket for hundreds of years!

Tooth Fairy = Never seems to age
Stem Cells = Stops the aging process
Baby Teeth = Stem Cells

Baby parts are good for all kinds of things

[L. VeGas]

...and baby eyeballs taste delicious sauteed in butter and garlic.

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Oprah

No

[falsification]

This alternative approach to harvesting stem cells from baby teeth could help researchers to bypass the moral debate over using embryonic stem cells for research.

Not quite. If this turns out to be the case, it will mean that those of us against embryonic stem cell research, where the embryonic stem cells come from a fetus destroyed for this purpose, will have a new, even more devatstating argument.

Re:No

[rothic]

This alternative approach to harvesting stem cells from baby teeth could help researchers to bypass the moral debate over using embryonic stem cells for research.
Not quite. If this turns out to be the case, it will mean that those of us against embryonic stem cell research, where the embryonic stem cells come from a fetus destroyed for this purpose, will have a new, even more devatstating argument.
Devastating argument against what? The original post was regarding the ability of scientific researchers to take stem cells from sources other than embryos...and in doing so, they themselves can bypass the debate on such practices. It had nothing to do with whether or not people were still capable of disagreement on embryonic research.

Re:No

[MillionthMonkey]

Not quite. If this turns out to be the case, it will mean that those of us against embryonic stem cell research, where the embryonic stem cells come from a fetus destroyed for this purpose, will have a new, even more devatstating argument.

Your use of even in that sentence implies that you previously had a moderately "devastating" argument in the first place, and you do not. Maybe this will give you an argument that rises above nonsensical (and you sure could use one of those), but to say it's devastating is a stretch.

Your statement contains two factual errors. Embryonic stem cells don't come from a fetus, they're harvested from an embryo. The cells in a fetus are too well differentiated. And the embryo in question is not "destroyed for this purpose". People who go to fertility clinics to undergo in vitro fertilization generally don't want to raise a litter of 10 kids at once. The procedure isolates the most successful of many embryos and dispenses with the rest of them. That is the purpose for which they are destroyed. I don't understand why people make such a fuss about stem cell research when the embryos are destroyed by fertility procedures in the first place. I guess anything that results in more babies in the world is less likely to generate complaints from some people.

You also speak as if you know for a fact that these baby teeth stem cells are as viable as embryonic cells. You don't know that's true at all. In general stem cells from non-embryonic sources are not as viable and are much more difficult to work with.

Procurement of children's teeth.

[s0l0m0n]

Does this mean that it's once again legal to hunt children for thier teeth?

Re:Stem Cell Uses and Origions

[norton_I]

Anti-stem cell propoganda point #1 "stem cells come from aborted baby." This is just plain wrong. By the time you know you are pregnent, it is really too late to use the fetus for stem cells. Most (all?) research stem cells have come from fertility clinics where several harvested eggs are fertalized in vitro, then the most viable is re-implanted into the woman and comes to turn, while the others would be incinerated.

Now, you are free to say that is wrong, or even call it abortion, but firstly it is much different than a "traditional" abortion where the embryo is destroyed and/or removed from a woman's uterus, and secondly, I don't see anyone trying to ban fertility clinics.

My personal feeling is that the primary instigators of the anti-stem cell movement are actually against stem cell research because they view it as playing God and meddling in affairs we have no right to. I respect that opinion, but to disguise it as protecting the lives of "innocent children" is duplicitous.

Also, stem cell research has only been going on in a real fashion for a couple of years now, and it is one of the most promising leads in medicine and science, both for it potential to repair people and to understand how life works -- two of the most important things we do as humans. It has shown incredibal potential in laboratory animals, and the fact is it takes time to develop treatments for humans precicely because of the ethical questions in human testing, and the care researchers take to insure they are not placing their test subjects in undue risk. To write it off because it hasn't saved anybody's life yet is short sighted and naive.

Incedentally, and totally off topic, I actually think life begins well before conception, and that every cell in every creature is alive, and a beautiful mystery of the universe, including gammetes. However, this doesn't stop me from eating meat or vegtables, killing incects, taking antibiotics, using birth control, or supporting the rights of women to have abortions. The question is, when does human life begin, and the only things I am pretty sure of are that it isn't before conception or after birth. I suspect it is not particuarly close to either one of those extremes, though.

Death is a natural part of life (the last part...), and even killing: we kill plants and animals to eat and stay alive, we kill animals and bacteria that try to kill us, we step on countless incects without realizing it, untold numbers of animals die as roadkill because they don't know better and we don't think it is important enough not to build highways, and we kill each other for a variety of reasons. While I am all about keeping killing to a minimum, at the end of the day the only thing I really care about is that the human species doesn't die, and to that end I also think that we should try to stop killing born people before we worry to much about the unborn, or the non-human/non-sentient.

Re:Stem Cell Uses and Origions

[Dr. Manhattan]

Life does begin at conception...

Personally, I have a hard time thinking of something without a brain as a human being. An anencephalic baby, for example, seems like a failed attempt at a human. So, a blastula, whether implanted or not, even in the early stages of differentiation, can't be a person, even if it's composed of human tissue.

Before the brain is formed (~30 days), I don't really have a problem with abortion. Regrettable, certainly, but it's not murder or anything like that.

I don't know what the minimum number of brain cells is needed to support sentience though, and I'm squeamish and conservative, so I'd say after about 30 days there has to be a risk to the life of the mother to justify abortion. (You can't force someone to risk their life to save another.) In the case of rape, I think the woman should start checking for pregnancy before 30 days. After that, there's at least a strong case to be made that there's another person to consider.

Re:Stem Cell Uses and Origions

[Mr. Slippery]

In Biology, I learned that one life cannot transform itself into something else.

Then your biology teachers were remarkable ignorant. All life is constantly transforming. Organisms grow and die, changing size and shape (sometimes radially - think catepillar to butterfly) along the way.

On the cellular level, single cells spilt in two. In some organisms two cells merge into one, or two cells swap DNA. Cells differentiate.

Everything changes. That's why today, life is more than a puddle of primordial uck.

The only difference between a blastula and an amoeba is that a blastula is actually a human, and then by definition a person.

It is not at all trivial to say that all humans are persons. Is a brain dead human still a person? Is a pre-verbal infant a person? A newborn? A severely retarded adult? The issue of what organisms should be accorded "person" status is a condsiderable debate.

Nor is it obvious that a blastula is a human - composed of human cells, yes, but so the drop of blood I washed down the sink after cutting myself shaving. Don't confuse "human" as an adjective (e.g., "human cells", "human blood") with human as a noun.

A blastula is human, but it is not a human. It certainly isn't a person under any reasonable definition I've encountered that excludes supernaturalism (appeals to "the presense of a soul" and the like).

Re:Use teeth instead of blood from the umbilical c

[gene_tailor]

Maybe! More research is needed to see how versatile the stem cells found in baby teeth are. So far the researchers found the cells from baby teeth can make several types of differentiated cells, but these cells may not be able to make all kinds of other cells (medical jargon: they may not be pluripotent) like embryonic stem cells.