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Stem Cells Mend Spinal Injuries
Darkman, Walkin Dude writes "New research shows that rats that had their spinal columns severed were able to regain use of their hind legs through the use of stem cells from embryonic rats." From the Wired article: "Spinal cord injuries can be caused by accidents or infections and affect 250,000 people a year in the United States alone, costing $4 billion annually, according to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders. Whittemore's team took specific cells from rat embryos called glial restricted precursor cells -- a kind of stem cell or master cell that gives rise to nerve cells."
Oh, that's right... the frozen embryos have souls or some such shit. Yes, this is a hateful post because I simply can't fathom why this scientific area can't be advanced without controversy in the US. I really, really don't get it. I'd love for somebody to explain it to me. Please!
I just wasted your mod points! HA!
...because we have snivling bio-ethics people who cry about 'playing god' when these same morons get the sniffles, they want the most powerful drugs in existance to not only kill their bug - but to blow it's ass to mars...
There's far more involved than just regenerating some relatively simple structures like a rat spinal column when the goal is human spinal injury.
I've had a lamenectomy. It's a procedure where tissue has to be removed from between discs in the spine. In my case, I herniated the tissue during heavy squats (word to the wise from a lifetime power lifter, don't do squats, they're too dangerous.) In my case, the tissue was pushed through the fibrous outer sheath that holds the spinal column together. The only possible way to "heal" this would have been to somehow take all the pressure off that part of the body (prevent all muscle movement and stretch the body on a rack), push the tissue back inside then seal the fibrous outer sheath.
Would I pay for such an option? Yes. Is it possible? No. Would some form of simple application of stem cells allow my body to rebuild the missing tissue? Probably not. Not only is a human spinal column far more complex than that of a rat, so are human brains. The human body also lives far longer and the human body is more articulate.
This is nice news but it's just the start of what would have to be a long, long, long process. There's no way to have perfect regeneration of plant tissue yet. Thinking human tissue would be able to regenerate any time soon is silly.
Every other week or so there is some big success story regarding the regrowth of neural tissue using spinal stem cells, but hardly a word about embryonic stem cells. I understand that there is a ban on using government funds to pursue embryonic stem cell research, however I would like to know whether such research is taking place anywhere. And if it is, why aren't the dramatic results we see with spinal stem cells also being trumpeted by embryonic stem cell researchers?
There are many people who could ultimately benefit from this research, and it certainly shows much promise. I know several people personally who could stand to regain some quality of life if doctors could regrow nerve tissues in humans.
Are spinal stem cells better than embryonic stem cells at growing this type of tissue, or is it simply a case of too little money going into embryonic stem cell research?
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
Like you said, the frozen embryos and the stem cells taken from them aren't ours to screw around with like this. They do (and should) belong to the organism they were taken from.
Wonderful, said organism is frozen and 99% likely never to see any functional life.
When it comes to human stem cells, that organism is another human life. It's a simple path from "We want the paraplegic to walk again" to "we will kill humans to allow others to walk again".
Do tell, Anonymous Coward, why is taking stem cells from a donated and otherwise perpetually frozen embryo equal to killing a human?
*shrug*. and people wonder why this country is going downhill
Obviously, because of MTV.
I just wasted your mod points! HA!
I read today Senator Frist went against Bush and is now supporting stem cell funding and research. I really hope the American public can put enough pressure to get the White House behind saving American lives and repairing damage such as spinal cord injuries
How dare you.
This is America. How dare anyone presume to step into the shoes of God by improving the conditions of or completely healing those who are sick or disabled. Man has no right dictate and change what God has obviously deemed his will by employing ridiculous and sinful medical practices.
Unless you live in the midwest and you're trying to knock your wife with the funky teeth up with nine babies. That's totally fine.
Because it is the obligation of good christian women to offer up their fertile wombs for implantation of these harvested embryos and carry them to term whilst burning at the stake the women who donated them in the first place.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Well, let's see, there IS the question of when life begins. You can't have seen any discussion of embryonic stem cell research without encountered that aspect.
There's also a very valid concern about preventing trafficking in human tissue. Just as there are lots and lots of controls on organ harvesting and donations, there needs to be a way to prevent pregnancies simply for the sake of harvesting embryos to gain such tissue.
There are also a lot of concerns about ensuring this is actually a path with true possibility of results rather than a ghoulish battleground over the value of life and a macabe sideshow. Think of how the Nazi and Imperial Japanese performed experiments on living people. Where is the line drawn? It's a very serious issue.
Monstrously irresponsible snake-oil statements like that made by John Whatshisname (yeah, he was even "my" senator, shows how much he did for NC) that if John Kerry was elected President quadraplegics woudl stand up out of their wheelchairs and walk again are...shall we say...far less than responsible.
On the other hand, if the comments Senator Frist made are true that it is now evident that stem cells are not capable of endless regeneration and there are far fewer than the original 78 strains of stem cells available for federally funded research, perhaps allowing collection of stem cells from those which are left over from invitreo is a good idea.
Your post shows you don't really know much about this.
There is no restriction on private investment into stem cell research.
There are sources of human stem cells other than killing human embryos. Given the current belief that human embyonic stem cells cannot replicate indefinately, they are actually a poor source of the genetic material.
(Sidebar: there are very, very, very few human cells which can replicate endlessly. I don't remember the anem of the woman from whom one strain was harvested and is used for bio research. Virtually all cells have a limit to the number of tiems they can split.)
Prior to President Bush's plan of 4 years ago, there was no Federal funding for this research at all. A lot of what you would be seeing in the common media is not scientific, it's political.
It is great news as it also may have implications for the large number of Multiple Sclerosis (MS) patients.
As you may already know MS is a chronic automimmune disorder where your body attacks the protective sheath around nerve cells causing them to degrade slowly over time. It is not yet curable. This type of damage is smaller than if your spinal cord was ripped apart in an accident and thus it may be easier to repair.
If this therapy proves to be useful in MS it will help a large number of people and save billions for countries.
Standards Schmandards
I think we have a bit of hope though. In a speech in front of the Senate, Bill Frist, the leader of the Senate Republicans, used the "s"-word when discussing this issue. "It isn't just a matter of faith, it's a matter of science." Yeah, I was shocked too. If we're lucky, the bill in question will be passed so we can be done with Bush's inane stem cell research policy.
need to start making "I broke my spine and all I got was this aborted fetus" tees
Why is this flamebait? As my foggy memory recalls it was due to the direct intervention of Bush that the stem cell research was banned in the USA. In some of the recent National Geographic issues the main topic was stem cell research.
According to them, there are 155 stem cell lines in the world atm, 78 out of them can have federal support in funds, and 22 out of them is usable for research AND can have federal support for them, thats mostly because most of the stem cell cultivations are just too old already and were created with old technology. In the UK for example researchers are experimenting with a new method to get rid of the current method of handling those stem cells. Currently it's very resource intensive and costy to maintain the existing lines, but since the law doesn't allow for new stem cells to be harvested and to get federal funds for them, it means they need to deal with the old ones.
A five day old impregnated zygote is smaller than the dot at the end of this sentence.
It has no unique features and there is not even a trace of nervous system. Clearly, people opposing stem cell research should first familiarize themselves first with the "baby" and "murder" they are talking about.
NG quotes some Marie Dooley, who offered her surplus embryos after artificial, in vitro, fertilisation to stem cell research. She said something like that "If they would have a heartbeat, the whole situation would be completely different, but those embryos are only groups of cells and they would have landed in the sewer if not offered for research." or something of that effect. the NG review is very long, it details the issue through 23 pages of informative description from all viewpoints. I'd recommend it for everyone.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
What we need is a bulldozer to run over the children of every republican congressmen (at the state and federal levels,) not enough to kill them.. just force them into a fucking wheelchair, permanently. Then we'll see some opinions change.. until then, these scum sucking bastards will keep on promising their hardcore religious base that they'll protect america from the insidious & godless liberal infiltrators, fuck science, fuck progress, and fuck you america -> I'm getting elected again!
What kind of fucking maniac are you? Your publically advocating the maiming of innocent children for what you preceve as the sins of the parents. You should have your spine severed somewhere between your brain and your body....no wait, it's already happened for you to make such a hateful comment. I'm all for progress, better life through science, and all that bull shit. But give it a rest. You wanna maim the people that are voting and deciding this bull shit on the government level, fine, I'm all for that. It's people like you that give the freaks in the religious faction all the ammo they need to push forward with this shit. Mod this down if you like, But the parent post needs to be modded down too.
"Does your computer have IP on it?"
I'll start with saying that it is good to see scientific progress, but is it possible to do this with adult / cord stem cells too? Second, everyone says that Bush is against stem cell research. He is only against federal funding to embryonic stem cell research. That doesn't mean he wants to ban it, well he does, but that is besides the point. All he ever did was say the Government can't support it. Third, other than this, I have yet to see an example of Embryonic stem cell research actually working and adult stem cells don't work, or where Embryonic stem cells actually work at all. If adult stem cells show more promise, and don't involve the taking of a human life (the reason this is all contriversial in the first place), why not use them. About the "how can we support a president who is against scientific progress" issue. It isn't that the pro-life people are anti-scientific progress, it is that they don't beleive science should be working against the betterment of humanity. At least they don't think killing for progress is right.
Skipping the theological mellodrama..
You might be able to tell me at what speed an object falls to the earth, but can you tell me why it falls? Something as simple as gravity? Science is observing events and trying to predict what will happen. Science does not purport to understand why something happens.
Um, science _does_ attempt to explain to the best of our ability why things happen. Is "gravity" not a perfectly valid answer to your question? If you want to recursively ask "Why?" to every explanation, then I challenge you to explain your faith and allow me to extend the same courtesy. I guarantee you will run out of productive statements long before I will.
The fact that you refeer to soul and "some such shit" in the same sentance leads me to believe you believe you are right and everyone else is wrong, and that you should be the one who decides where my tax dollars are spent.
Blah, blah, blah. Vica versa. Ad nausem.
All that Bush did was listen to his constituents, who said they don't want their tax dollars being spent on embryos that came from abortions.
Woah, Woah! Hold it right there. This is where you demonstrate a complete lack of understanding. Embryos that came from abortions? From the wikipedia...
Embryonic stem cells are stem cells derived from the undifferentiated inner mass cells of a blastocyst, an early stage embryo consisting of 50-150 cells. They are pluripotent, meaning they are able to grow into any of the 200 cell types in the body. Embryonic stem cells can be obtained from a cloned blastocyst, created by fusing a denucleated egg cell with a patient's cell. The blastocyst produced is allowed to grow to the size of a few tens of cells, and stem cells are then extracted. Because they are obtained from a clone, they are genetically compatible with the patient.
200 cells is not a fetus by any stretch of the imagination. Nor is a blastocyst a fetus. These is very much a lab created process and trying to apply your morality via rubber stamp doesn't exactly line up.
I just wasted your mod points! HA!
It is because we haven't had time to adequately address the moral concerns such activity raises.
It was largely agreed at the end of the second world war that the human experimentation that went on in NAZI germany was wrong. This is despite the numerous real medical advancements that were made as a result of such experimentation. Most reasonable individuals agreed that the societal cost performing compulsory experiments on essentially random members of society was greater than the benefit of the resulting medical knowledge.
It has since been agreed that, to some extent, animal experiment is okay as long as certain moral guidelines are followed. This is because cruelty toward animals has a dehumanizing effect on the human participant (as evidenced by the fact that most serial killers got their start with animals).
This puts us in a tricky situation when it comes to embryos and cloning. On the one hand, it is well established that an embryo is not the same as a person, on the other hand, an embryo has the potential the become a living, breathing member of society. So where do you draw the line? If experimentation on embryos is not human experimentation, is is certainly the cousin of human experimentation.
I'm not saying that the cost is not worth the benefit, I am only saying that there is a cost, and that we need to decide how far down the path toward human experimentation we can go before the costs outweigh the benefits.
I've never seen credible evidence that a person with a personality gets created before there is a working brain. Would love to be contradicted here with a few references to e.g. Nature? (-: Or even a few bible verses with claims that life start at conception...? :-)
I am, frankly, not holding my breath.
Now, someone might argue that a process is started at conception which would end up with a functioning human. The potential is critical. There are a few problems with that position:
- When a fertile woman smiles back at me (-: it has happened
:-), there is a potential for a new human
- Soon, all our cells will be potential humans with a little "twist"...
- Half of all conceptions ends soon with a spontaneous abortion. That means, according to the bible belt, that half of all people dies at an age of a few days. To be consistent, the believers should argue that half of all medical research should try to stop this mass death!
I could go on. (The potential argument is pathetically blurry and compare amateurs like Stalin and Hitler with tens of millions dying from spontaneous abortions... every year.)Your correct (IMHO) point is that given the assumption that life starts at conception, the rest of the religious people's position is logical. My point is that they are quite easily described as fuckwits with the same basis as "Son of Sam" had for his world view.
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
Because I have karma to burn...
The exact quote from John Edwards is, "If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going to get up out of that wheelchair and walk again."
I don't find anything particularly monstrously irresponsible about this quote. He doesn't imply that people will get up out of their wheelchairs a week or two after Kerry would have been elected. I think most people, like me, are smart enough to realize that curing spinal cord injury is a while coming.
However, personally, I'm convinced that if we put our collective ingenuity in medical research towards finding a cure for spinal cord injuries, we will get real and tangible results, as this article demonstrates. It's not a cure, but it sure is progress.
The election of John Kerry would not have necessarily accomplished this goal during his presidency, and I don't think that Edwards's quote was implying that it would. After all, John F. Kennedy said in 1961, "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth." Even if he had not been assassinated in 1963 and re-elected in 1964, his goal still wouldn't have happened while he was in office.
It is certain that the election of George W. Bush has hindered the goal of finding a cure to spinal cord injury. He has shut down a major source of funding in an area of research that, as we can see from this article, is directly relevant to finding a cure.
The really frustrating thing is the reason given for shutting down this funding—some misguided notion that an embryo is somehow morally equivalent to a human being. I find it interesting that most of these fundamentalists have no problem at all with killing highly complex organisms such as rats, monkeys, rabbits, and so on in the name of scientific research, but a clump of nondescript cells with no capacity for thought, feeling, or any sensation at all; a clump of nondescript cells with no past, present, or future; a clump of nondescript cells very similar to the kind that we wash off in the shower every day without even thinking; is somehow sacred.
What if these same fundamentalists had insisted that researching advanced rocket propulsion techniques in the '60's was too similar to building a Tower of Babel, attempting to reach to heaven? Would John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson have cowered to this weird religious-based belief and let the Russians unilaterally own space today?
I hope not, just as I hope that in the next election, we manage to get some leadership who is willing to stand up for science that can make our lives better instead of trying to push America further and further into a new dark age of technology because of religious fundamentalism.
> What makes the life of a fly or ant that you've most certainly killed less
> precious than the frozen embryo that never developed into a human?
The same thing that:
- makes _your_ life more precious than said fly
- made it precious when _you_ were a _human embryo_
Hmmm, yes a "clump of cells" as long as it wasn't the "clump of cells" that turned out to be you.
If it was the clump of cells that would have turned out to be me, I promise you I wouldn't have minded at the time, and after that I wouldn't be in a position to be minding anything.
"We've got no business causing spinal injuries to animals, or any injuries for that matter. Test them on humans if humans are who they aim to benefit."
Right, glad you volunteered, just lay down please this won't hurt a bit...
I think, therefore I am...I think.
Do tell, Anonymous Coward, why is taking stem cells from a donated and otherwise perpetually frozen embryo equal to killing a human?
Interesting. Do you think that a human embryo is not human?
Is a human foetus human? How about a child? Or an adolescent?
What defines human for you?
Is it the presence of intelligence? In which case do you consider people less intelligent than yourself less human?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Sure, no problem. A lot of people like to think that an embryo is morally a person, but in our practical day-to-day lives, no one really treats it as such. Ponder this:
These are just a few ways off the top of my head in which even conservatives do not treat an embryo or fetus as the moral equivalent of a human being. I'm sure if I put some more thought into it, I could come up with plenty more.
No, we're not. That's my point.
But the clump of cells wasn't me, therefore it's irrelevant. I keep seeing people confuse something's potential with it's reality. Just because something has the potential to be something else doesn't give it the status or rights of that thing it may someday become. As someone else pointed out, if my mom had had an abortion, it wouldn't make a lick of difference to me because I simply would have never existed. This is far, far different from my present life being ended by someone sneaking in and killing me in the middle of the night, because at this point, my existence isn't potential, it's reality.
Using your logic, one could just as easily say that if Osama bin Laden's mother had had an abortion, the world would arguably be a much happier and safer place, and because of this, women should have more abortions. It's a non sequitur and I reject such arguments. Let's make important decisions like this based on what what the reality of the situation is, not what it may or may not be someday or what it could or could not have been if something had been different.
Or framed in a different way, it's very possible in the near future that we'll be able to clone human beings from the intact DNA contained in any of the millions of cells in our bodies. At that point, should we start saving every sloughed off cell because the potential exists for it to be a person? Additionally, we probably have the technology now to freeze our extra cells to save them for the purpose of becoming new human beings when such technology does exist. Should we never let any of them go to waste now? Of course not, everyone knows that's silly. The same holds true for the clump of cells that is an embryo. Just because it has the potential to be a human being someday doesn't give it any special or sacred status today.
There are two types of stem cell research currently being conducted. Embryonic stem cells and adult stem cells. The only most people hear about is embryonic, which, as I'm sure most of you know, kills the embryo. This type of stem cell research seems to just now be taking off.....in rats, not real people. HOWEVER, adult stem cell research has had quite a bit of success over the past few years. Real human people have benefitted from this research. Stem cells are taken out of the adult who has an injury (for example from the spinal cord) and are reinjected into the host and, many times, regain the ability of whatever it was that was lost. Embryonic stem cells are usually rejected by the recipient due to different types of whatever, I don't know exactly, I'm not a scientist. Adult stem cells are never rejected because they come from the person. Adult stem cell research does NOT kill anyone or anything. If only the government would support adult stem cell research and not embryonic I believe we would have seen many more advances in this area.
We're talking human beings.
No, we're not. This is the thing that "Human-at-conception" camp, which refers to itself as "pro-life" constantly ignores, no matter how many times it's brought up. All human cells do not have rights. Only individuals have rights. Embryonic stem cells are not individuals for a variety of reasons.
Those who want to assert that life begins at conception frequently fall back on logic that flies in the face of longstanding legal precedent. They say embryos are human, for example, because they represent a unique set of human DNA. But if this definition of what is human were true, it would be okay to kill a twin as long as the other twin remained. It's not. A human is more than simply a set of cells with unique DNA. And we've recognized that for thousands of years. The set of cells must also pass a certain stage of development. Otherwise, any stem cell which could potentially be cloned through somatic cell transfer would be human.
While many socieites differed radicially from ours in terms of their legal code, and assigned rights to a patriarch, a family, or a nation, our society assigns rights primarily to individual human beings.
Cells don't have rights until they become individuals. An individual is one person, and one person only. Never two or three or possibly four people. An individual is only one person. An embryonic stem cell is one or two or possibly three people, or none at all if it doesn't attach to the uterine wall.
Likewise, the often repeated canard of 'what if you were aborted doesn't support those who say people are humans at conception unless you also don't believe in contraception, or any other act which would prevent the birth of a person. After all, if my parents had gone to the movies instead of making me, I wouldn't be here either. But what kind of logic is that? This is a case of assuming what you're trying to prove. People who don't believe than individuality starts at conception will never be persuaded by this argument, because they don't believe that they were 'them' at conception. They believe they were still a 'pre-individual.'
Hmmm, yes a "clump of cells" as long as it wasn't the "clump of cells" that turned out to be you. Strange how the "human" dividing line moves so.
Moving? Are you claiming that he's applying one standard to himself, and another standard to other people. If so, I really don't think you understand his argument. But if you're saying that there are a lot of people who disagree with you and hold different moral standards which they apply to all people then yes, you're absolutely right.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
The embryo is part of the species homo sapiens. But it is *not* entirely the same as a sentient creature we usually think of when using the word "human".
Most people would be against killing the latter for the benefit of others. The former? That isn't so clear, but in any case don't mix those togheter when discussing stem cell research.
- These characters were randomly selected.
I find it interesting that most of these fundamentalists have no problem at all with killing highly complex organisms such as rats, monkeys, rabbits, and so on...
Heck, forget the monkeys--what about their bland willingness (or even outright blood lust) for killing non-christians? "Thou shalt not kill" isn't all that hard of a concept.
It doesn't say "thou shalt not kill people who look like you".
It doesn't say "Thou shalt not kill except for oil."
It doesn't even say "Thou shalt not kill unless they started it, in which case it's fine to open a little Whoop-ass on their sorry Is-le-amic butts."*
I wouldn't mind the fundementalists (of any flavour) nearly as much if they actually pratciced what they preached instead of running around like a bunch of anti-social nitwits, blowing up buses and abortion clinics and killing people--or voting to have somebody else's kids go kill them--in the name of their god.
--MarkusQ
* What it does say about "they started it" is "turn the other cheek."
I mean, they've already shown us that being paralysed does nothing against intellegence (Stephen Hawking)
Well, duh. Being paralyzed is a huge dexterity hit, intelligence doesn't enter into it.
~Will
sig?
I've got advanced multiple sclerosis, and the ONLY hope I have for sutvival, let alone being able to walk again, lies with stem cells (plus some way to remove the scars already on my nercous system). Most people assume this means embrionic cells, but there are other ways. For example,in nasal cavity tissue, there are stem cells that can, and do, differentiate into neurons. This would help not only myself, but many others, with MS, spinal cord injuries, Parkinson's, ALS, and possibly even Alzheimer's and BSE.
I realize that these won't cure verything, but why is this research being ignored in favor of embrionic stem cells? There are no moral issues here, no politically-demanded guidelines to be followed, only a chance to help lots of people before they wither away and die. Yet, from what I've been able to see, this avenue is being soundly ignored by researchers.
'I am truly baffled.
Lemon curry?