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US Stem Cells Contaminated
Croaking Toad writes "According to The Register, US-based scientists using stem cells has hit a brick wall. The stem cells apparently have been contaminated for quite a while with animal proteins rendering them useless in the treatment of human illnesses. New stem cell harvesting was outlawed in the USA by a 2001 Executive Order from President Bush." To be precise, stem cell harvesting wasn't outlawed; the usage of federal funding was outlawed. Several states and research institutions have been using their own money to undertake research. The AP coverage is up as well. Update: 01/24 19:40 GMT by J : Carl Zimmer has a fascinating description of the sugars we humans lack that contaminated the stem cell lines. What a curious genetic heritage we have...
See ya later, Johnny (1925-2005) and thanks for the memories!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
This is something that was known, albeit not well known at the time of the executive order. Sadly this fact was not very widely publicized at the time and forces me to wonder why it is big news and such a shock now.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
That makes this decision all the better. The current system that allows private companies to profit from research funded with federal grant money is broken. We should stop all such funding until the government gets royalties on discoveries made on it's dime, or until a compulsory license is issued for all patents on inventions discovered using public dollars.
Everyone seems to forget that embryos are not the only sorce of stem cells.... bood from the ambylical cord contain stem cells, these cells are already being harvestead and used to treat spinal cord injuries.... as posted in this Slashdot Artical.
From The Corner:
Well, fundamentally it's an effort to make an argument for new stem cell lines, by undermining the viability of all the existing lines, including those federally funded. There's not much new to it, except now it's dressed up in a "new" study, when everyone has always known that these lines (not just the Bush-approved ones, but almost all ES cell lines developed past a certain stage) were developed with so-called mouse feeder cells. To call this "contamination" is simply dishonest. A good number of cell products used in humans are developed with feeder cells from animals, and some of these (not embryonic cells, but other cell products) have been successfully developed into medical treatments in the past.
A couple of key points. First, it is not true that all the Bush-approved lines were developed with these mouse feeder cells. There are sixteen lines (not counted in the LA Times's "20 or so" available lines) that have been frozen in an early state, so as to wait for better cell development techniques. These have never been exposed to mouse feeder cells or any other cells, they are frozen and could be used if these folks had a better method to suggest.
Second, the FDA has a lot of experience dealing with cell products (again, not embryonic stem cell, but others) developed with such animal cells. Then-administrator of the FDA Mark McClellan, in testimony before [the president's bioethics council] in September of 2003 [found here] was asked about the mouse feeder layer issue in embryonic stem cells, and he replied: "We've certainly had experience, successful experience, in thousands of patients in documenting the safety of cells that have been exposed to animal feeder cells, mouse feeder cells, and the like."
This new study strikes me as a partially dishonest repackaging of old worries in an effort to put new pressure on the Bush administration's funding policy. The trouble with it, as with all similar efforts by the researchers, is that the policy is based on a moral conviction, not a scientific assessment. Even if what they are saying were correct, it doesn't change the moral problem with embryonic stem cell research, and so will not change the policy. And from what I can see, it isn't correct either.
Par for the course, alas. What a course!
Did the Clinton administration receive any requests to fund stem cell research? If it didn't, then your point is meaningless. Maybe stem cell research didn't really exist before Bush became president?
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
The Belgian scientist, Catherine Verfaillie, who was leading the Stem-cell research department of the University of Minnesota is coming back to Belgium because of the whole anti-stem cell research climate in the US and because it is becoming harder and harder to find appropriate funding. If this kind of thing goes on, the US will quickly lose its leading position in some kinds of research. And I think that another four years of Bush might quickly accelerate this trend.
Yes. In fact, recent studies are showing the stem cells extracted from fat cells or even from hair cells (you know, the white thing at the end of the hair follicle you pull out) are a great source of stem cells. These stem cells are also more tame and easier to control than embryonic stem cells.
I really hate it when somebody says President Bush is against stem cell research. He's not. He's against harvesting embryonic stem cells. He's even funding already harvested embryonic stem cell research, as the parent posters pointed out.
I also hate it when people say stem cells can cure disease X. It isn't true, yet. Stem cells have yet to cure anything. If stem cells could cure diabetes or paralysis or brain damage or nerve damage, don't you think you'd hear a lot more about it in the press? Don't you think there would be advertisements on the radio asking for people with disease X to participate in a research project using stem cells? But you don't. That's because stem cells have yet to produce anything. Some researchers are beginning to fear that stem cells are just too hard to control and useful remedies won't be out for decades or even centuries.
There are other more promising routes of research. For instance, the Atkin's diet has been proven to lower blood cholesterol and to reduce the severity of diabetes. Why aren't we spending as much money on that as we are on stem cell research?
This whole stem cell fiasco has been a hammer to pound President Bush on the head, and I think every sane human out there has seen it for what it is. "Christopher Reeves died because of President Bush" just doesn't ring of truth at all. Let's stop politicizing science and just approach it with objectivity and skepticism for once, folks. And please, when science starts stretching the bounds of morality, let's make the right decision to limit science and not limit morality. That's what makes us different from the research that German and Japanese scientists did in WWII.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
_My_ tax dollars go into those research coffers and it makes me _really_ angry that they can't be used for this research to better the survival chances of our species because of some phony pseudo-morality political pandering.
I actually get more angry that our tax dollars go to support medical research that is then patented and sold back to us a insane rates.
I wish people would top being "technically correct" and discuss the real issue at hand . . stem cell research outside of the current lines of embyronic stem cells. was seriously hindered by the actions of this government
Are you under the impression that the federal government EVER funded embryotic stem cell research? It didn't.
Finkployd
Finkployd
While it's true that there are immune response problems with using straight embryonic stem cell lines as therapeutic cures for genetic diseases, there are ways around it that are being researched. "Deprogramming" is the term used for taking an adult somatic cell and turning it back into a stem cell-like state through environmental influence (aka enucleating the somatic cell and putting the nucleus into another cell that will tell the nucleus that it is a stem cell). This technique is very promising, however, requires that the environment for the cell be of a stem cell-like state, meaning that you take the nucleus out of a somatic cell, put it into an enucleated stem cell, and, voile! you have your very own personalized stem cell, complete with individual VDJ immune markers...Embryonic stem cells are needed, one way or another. The mechanisms of the dedifferentiation is being explored by the lab that I work in as well as other PRIVATELY FUNDED LABS (we have to segregate our equipment, no federally funded equipment can even be used to work on lines that are not CDC, cough, contaminated), however, the specifics are a long way from being figured out. Until then, enjoy cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and paralysis.
For the purposes of this post I will treat these embryos as if they are a human life. Whether I believe this myself is not an issue, since I am trying to see this from Bush's point of view and he clearly sees them as 'hav[ing] the potential for life'.
President Bush made the decision to attack Iraq and has justified that by saying that the war is beneficial to the Iraqis in the end as it brings them democracy. His opinion therefore must be that the benefit of life without pain and persecution for the many now and all those who will live there in the future is worth the sacrafice of a few thousand actual, adult, human lives. All of this was done using many billions of tax dollars.
President Bush accepts that stem cell research has 'promise and potential' for saving lives and relieveing pain by forming treatments for currently incurable conditions. Some embryos need to be sacraficed (not really my first choice of words, but it illustrates the point) to benefit the many now and all in the future. Yet Bush now thinks that saving the potential lives of the few outweigh the benefits to the many, at least where tax money is concerned.
Whether you agree or disagree with me on either of these issues, don't you think that this is a serious case of double-standards?
First of all, embryonic.
Secondly, don't believe the hype. One of the things we learned from Dolly (the cloned sheep) is that adult cells are quite different than fetal cells -- the loss of telomeres creates significant problems with aging and long term survival. We don't know entirely how stem cells are going to work; from the article, the Chinese have already abandoned them in favor of nasal cells from four month old fetuses. (In a counterpoint, I've read there are attempts to harvest the same cells from adults. It might work.)
Fundamentally, we don't really know what cures we're going to get out of stem cells. But this isn't an argument about whether they'll work or not; like you say, it's an argument about whether it's right to take the cells from fetuses. What I'm saying is that if a cure is found, the ethics will be rewritten, because while a fetus might be human, a six year old child and a seventy two year old grandfather definitely are.
So that's the fight. That's why you started by insisting that embryonic cells are useless. That's why the non-embryonic studies are getting funded so richly. Your only hope really is that the non-embryonic cures will be so fantastically effective that embryo-harvesting approaches won't be able to keep up. This is imaginable -- reimplanting one's own stem cells neatly avoids all sorts of rejection issues -- but it's not likely.
Those cells can be, and are, harvested from embryos that are otherwise discarded by fertility clinics. Do you really think scientists are going to order up a bunch of embryos and surgically remove eggs from human donors, in expensive and potentially dangerous procedures, while all these free embryos get trashed?
You're saying you'd rather those embryos just go to waste.
As long as we have fertility treatments that create surplus embryos, you can't take the moral high road on this. Those embryos are going to be destroyed, regardless. Might as well put them to some use. If you think embryos are lives, you're going after the wrong people. Go after the fertility clinics. In the meantime, let's lessen the waste and possibly save some lives.