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Paralyzed Woman Walks Again
mgv writes "It's been promised for years, but it's just become a reality. Stem cells taken from cord blood have enabled a paralysed woman in South Korea to walk again for the first time in 20 years. The details are on the Sydney Morning Herald Site which requires registration, but can also be seen on the World Peace Herald. Too late for Christopher Reeve, but not for the thousands of new injuries worldwide each year or the millions of paralysed people from other diseases in the world."
Cord blood stem cells are considered to be adult stem cells, not embryonic stem cells. Just wanted to get that out before all the Bush bashing starts.
But can they use stem cells to make my wife put out again?
Mundus vult decipi decipiatur ergo.
-Xaviera Hollander
I tried that, but after all that work I was tired and went to bed with a headache.
"If they have both, tell them we use Linux. And if they have that, tell them the computers are down." -Dave Chapelle
A press conference is not a peer reviewed journal. A woman walking in from of a camera does not mean a single stem cell helped her. Wait for journal publication, review, and commentary from experts before going around talking about how great this is.
Burn Hollywood Burn
Because now you have to grow the fetus into an embryo, kill it, and harvest the cord to get the cells. How is this better ?!?
Why can't we just get the stem cells from plants? Stems are abundant with them!
Okay, I'll bite on the last part, at least.
Your question is misleading. The government should be in charge of funding basic scientific research that drives forward our understanding of physics, biology, chemistry, etc, and creates the platform on which industry can develop specific products.
Why should the government do this? Because the results of fundamental research must be completely open and available to all scientists and entrepeneurs who would do something useful with it. Industry will *never* do that.
Government-funded researchers invented the calculus, the mechanical (and electronic) computer, and the internal combustion engine, and gave that research to the public, so that commercial and charitable use could be made of them. Industry, on the other hand, is busy trying to patent your *genes*!
"Stem cell research", as you can tell from the name, is not medicine, nor is it a commercial product. It is a fundamental piece of scientific research that advances our entire base of technology.
So yes, the government should fund it.
From here:
So-called "multipotent" stem cells -- those found in cord blood -- are capable of forming a limited number of specialised cell types, unlike the more versatile "undifferentiated" cells that are derived from embroyos.
Be real for a second and review industry's track record. Drugs for phantom depression. Drugs for sex enhancement. Drugs for obesity. None of these result from real societal problems and the greatest tragedy is that they aren't funding smaller problems with the major profits. They are just inventing more problems.
Perhaps a better question is "who do you want to define research priorities--government or industry?"
A government of the people should
Laws are for people with no friends.
The spinal cord is an enormously complex structure, the exact neural connections of which are formed in early embryonic life. That you could simply inject multipotential cells into a damaged cord and expect them to differentiate and grow into mature neurons, complete with appropriate connections, is asking an awful lot. In addition, in this patient, "paralyzed" for two decades, you have the issue of muscles, bones, and joints that haven't been in use all that time.
It would be wonderful if this account is true, but I'm not getting my hopes up until I see more of the fine print.
Ed Uthman, MD
Pathologist, Houston/Richmond, TX, USA
For starters, it's a bureaucratic nightmare for labs--if so much as a single "bad" sample makes its way into an experiment, they can lose all government funding in a heartbeat. Labs end up having to spend a surprising and frustrating amount of time and money simply to meet the ever-growing list of compliance demands for federal funding. Angling for private funding is all well and good, but there's a severe lack of funding for pure science; corporate sponsors are far more interested in applied science. Applied science is important, but pure science is equally important and would suffer badly if it weren't for federal funding.
Second, the stem cells in question are coming from discarded embryos from in-vitro fertilization clinics which are already slated for destruction. To ban these stem cells from research is hypocritical, at root--if the issue at hand is the destruction of a human life, they should be fighting just as hard to outlaw the practice of freezing embryos in the first place. That they're attacking the scientific link in this chain suggests that they're more against using these wasted embryos for scientific study (which, for various banal reasons, is seen as the arch-enemy of religion by many,) than they are upset about the wasting of embryos in the first place.
It's a shame that the debate such that the scientific community is being made out to be the villian here. The real villian is the IVF industry; science is simply stepping in and trying to conduct incredibly promising research with something that'd otherwise be flushed down the drain without so much as a second thought.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
There is a huge difference between the two.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
- "Uh, this is the sort of stem cells the Bush Administration supports, you ignorant dumbass." --- 25%
- "Well, yeah, but, Dumbya cut funding! And this is you: duh doo duh doo duh doo" --- 25%
- "Uh, Bush was the first to federally fund ANY stem cell research. And this is you: bibblebibblebibble pppbbbffffttttt!" --- 25%
And then the same people wonder why nothing works right anymore.
--- Ban humanity.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed