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Stem Cells Restore Feeling In Paraplegic
Vicissidude writes "According to WorldNetDaily scientists in Korea report using umbilical cord blood stem cells to restore feeling and mobility to a spinal-cord injury patient. The research, published in the peer-reviewed journal Cytotherapy, centered on a woman who had been a paraplegic 19 years due to an accident. After an infusion of umbilical cord blood stem cells, stunning results were recorded: 'The patient could move her hips and feel her hip skin on day 15 after transplantation. On day 25 after transplantation her feet responded to stimulation.'"
Does this mean that these cells were not harvested from an aborted fetus? If so this treatment could really take off without all the ethical and political problems that plague conventional stem cell treatments.
From a blog i found on google:
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I have known about this for some time, but because I didn't want to be guilty of the same hyping that is so often engaged in by some therapeutic cloning proponents, I waited until it was published in a peer reviewed journal. Now it has been and the news is HUGE: Korean scientists have used umbilical cord blood stem cells to restore feeling and mobility to a spinal cord injury patient. I have no link, but I do have the report published in Cytotherapy, (2005) Vol 7. No. 4, 368-373.
The patient is a woman who has been paraplegic from an accident for more than 19 years. (Complete paraplegia of the 10th thoracic vertebra.) She had surgery and also an infusion of umbilical cord blood stem cells. Note the stunning benefits: "The patient could move her hips and feel her hip skin on day 15 after transplantation. On day 25 after transplantation her feet responded to stimulation. On post operative day (POD) 7, motor activity was noticed and improved gradually in her lumbar paravertebral and hip muscles. She could maintain an upright position by herself on POD 13. From POD 15 she began to elevate both lower legs about 1 cm, and hip flexor muscle activity gradually improved until POD 41." It goes on from there in very technical language.
The bottom line is this, from the Abtract: Not only did the patient regain feeling, but "41 days after [stem cell] transplantation" testing "also showed regeneration of the spinal cord at the injured cite" and below it. "Therefore, it is suggested that UCB multipotent stem cell transplantation could be a good treatment method for SPI patients." (My emphasis.)
We have to be cautious. One patient does not a treatment make. Also, the authors note that the lamenectomy the patient received might have offered some benefit. But still, this is a wonderful story that offers tremendous hope for paralyzed patients. Typically, it has been extensively ignored in the American media (although it has gotten some foreign press attention). (Can you imagine the headlines if the cells used had been embryonic?)
One last point. This is a patient with a very old injury--making the results even more dramatic.
Onward!
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For those who missed the reference, it's
Cytotherapy, (2005) Vol 7. No. 4, 368-373.
Californians voted on Proposition 71 and pledged 300 million dollars over 10 years for stem cell research. Apparently, right-leaning political officials are now using bureaucracy to deny the 3 billion dollar pledge, and so not a dime has been issued yet. In this month's Wired magazine (which I don't have in front of me right now), they interview the head of the agency that is supposed to distribute the money; he explicitly said that if the US does not fund stem cell research, South Korea will soon emerge as the world leader. Being that I just read this yesterday, he seems to be very prescient...
They've cut mice in half and done this, and while their back half screws around for a bit, it's really not very long until their motion is completely back to normal.
Obviously, I'd benefit from an introductory college course in ethics, but this being Slashdot, I'll ask anyway. Is there a good reference online that describes "Ethics" (capital E) in a fairly general manner, such that the basic axioms like "the ends justify the means" are refuted in a logical and consistent manner? Is there a good book I should be reading on Ethics? Self-study is important to me, and I'd hate to re-hash well known arguments in a debate with someone more knowledgable than I. Appearing stupid or uneducated online is sort of par for the course, but I'd prefer to avoid looking stupid.
I'm proud of my Northern Tibetian Heritage
OK, I'll play, but only because I'm curious. What is the ethical problem with using embryonic stem cells from fertalized eggs that are being thrown away from a fertility clinic? They are other wise going to be thrown away or disposed of, so why not put them to use?
What I get confused with is how people are against that particular use, yet aren't against the fertility clinic itself, which outside the scope of this argument is throwing away fertalized eggs...aka "murder" to the extremists.
Now granted, there are plenty of other ways to use embryonic stem cells as well, but weve completely killed on good use but claiming all uses are bad.
As expected, everyone's sounding off about stem cell research. So... he's my inflation-depreciated .02.
... unless they're willing to ship 10% of them to me, refrigerated and boxed, so I can crack em and suck the fresh stem cells down and become a REAL Superman. If it's my own well-being involved, I have no ethics.
Stem cell research is a boon to medical science. Umbilical stem cells, which in no way hurts anyone (and which only a few outsider whacko groups are against), have proved invaluable to health care research. Embryonic stem cells (the ethical problem) are even more invaluable.
Here is the problem. As an individual, I support the legality of abortion. I don't like the fact that it's necessary at times, and I'd be glad to see it discouraged in any positive way possible. I can respect those who come to the painful realiziation that they simply cannot support a child due to serious personal issues (be it drug abuse, abject poverty, mental illness, etc). And conversely I have absolutely zero respect for those who terminate simply because it wouldn't suit their lifestyle. One is little different from an animal reabsorbing their fetus under stress, and the other is not far from infanticide out of convenience. And while I do not consider an embryo or even a fetus to be a "baby", I don't consider them mere biological byproducts of sex either.
In a limited, controlled, publicly accountable fashion, I can easily accept open stem cell research. Let's not beat around the bush - whatever the origin, you're destroying a human embryo for medical and research gain. When that embryo is the castoff from fertility work (ie spare embryos that had a chance but will never be complete), it's not so bad. But there's just something questionable about creating a human life simply to dismantle it.
I don't consider abortion infanticide unless it's late term (ie the fetus could actually survive with a little medical assistance). It's not an independant being yet, and it's by no means an infant until it can at least breathe without a machine (not counting injury/deformity). But in at least a limited way, once a fertilized ovum undergoes it's first cell division (not at fertilization, as it hasn't become a new entity yet), it has become a new human in every sense that a fetus or a toddler is. To say it's anything less is no different from saying that a baby or a retarded person is less human than you are. I'm not even talking about souls or religion - I have grave doubts about both subjects. To me, it's just the most logical conclusion.
So... while I applaud the wonders we can perform with placental and umbilical stem cells, and would like to see that research continue at full speed, I can more than understand why some people don't like seeing their tax dollars go to embryonic stem cell research. I personally don't care for the idea of creating human organisms, concious or not, simply for the gain of others.
Do not confuse "Freedom of Choice" with "Free Will".
Wait a second. What happens to the part where they're dead after being cut in half? That seems to me to be a severe impingement on the "working it out afterwards" phase.
0.o
Here we have what could be the biggest medical discovery of our lifetimes. Run around, dance in the street, be happy, throw a party, etc. Alright, Maybe a little skepticism of the discovery should be warranted. This is a little too good to be true.
But No! The whole thing turns into a thread revolving around the technicalities of federal funding of stem cell research. Mainly, why this should be another reason for you to hate George Bush. Which, if you RTFA, this category of research is not affected by the embryonic stem cell funding ban.
This reminds me of the threads where there's some new energy technology breakthrough and the whole thread is spent trying to find a reason why it has to be bad for the environment. If the thread involves anything remotely related to nuclear energy forget about it.
It seems that for some topics there is such a huge amount of misinformation about the subject, especially political hot potatos, that the whole thread has to be spent educating people.
When the thread comes up again, with the same issue, a whole new wave of the uneducated arrives and it starts all over again. This same thing has happed every time stem cells come up, it seems to happen even more on threads where the discovery did not use actual embryonic stem cells.
Typical Slashdot--fine, I'll bite. You guys don't read much actual Philosophy, do you? Makes it kind of hard to analyze Ethics if you've only done it from the comfort of the omniscient armchair.
Embryos being disposed of and prisoners who are given life terms being killed early are two very, very different things.
The main argument trumpeted by people against embryonic stem cell research is that embryos are worthy of "being saved," which is to say, they have "moral value." These same people, to be consistent, have to be against forms of very early abortion and even some forms (if not all forms) of contraception.
The basic thing that vexes these people is that they have never studied the potentiality principal. They think the mere fact that an embryo has the potential to become a human being gives it moral value, makes it "worthy of being saved." This is because they know human beings have moral value, and so conflate "a thing with potential to be something of moral value" with "a thing that has moral value." However, this argument is spurious, as I'll try to show.
For one thing, many things have the potential (i.e., have some causal relationship) to the creation of a healthy infant child. As someone else once suggested to me, one such thing is a glance of flirtation toward a fertile young woman. From that glance, there exists the potential for intercourse; from that intercourse, the potential of conception; from that conception, the potential of a human child in the form of an embryo.
If that example seems too cooked up, think about miscarriages. Hundreds of thousands of "babies" die from miscarriages every year. So, since that constitutes an essential mass death of a significant portion of the human "population," shouldn't we be devoting massive scientific research dollars to stopping miscarriages?
The reason both these things seem absurd is because saying that embryos have moral value is completely arbitrary. Harm cannot be done to embryos in the same way harm cannot be done to chairs or rocks. The chair or rock doesn't have a hope, an aspiration, or a direction which is thwarted by the said harm. The rock or chair doesn't care about the said harm. The crux of the matter is, the rock or chair isn't conscious, and that's why they have no moral value.
The only people who might care about the rock or chair's harm is the owner of the said rock or chair. But that is only due to a relational property between the owner and his objects, and hasn't a thing to do with morality. (For example, when considering whether humans have the right to harm other humans, it serves no one to say, "Okay, but what if the person harmed were your mother?" Introducing the familial relationship simply distorts the inherent morality of a thing, since it makes the decision relational, based on other notions such as loyalty to one's family, etc.)
The reason we see harms to dogs or cows as worse than harms to chairs is because we know that dogs or cows can a) experience pain, b) in dying or being severely harmed, be deprived of their right to continue the life they were already living. Chairs experience no pain, conceive of no harm, and have no life of which to be deprived.
One can make an argument for defending the late-term fetus (which may be conscious) from abortion, but preventing the embryo from use in scientific research based on the idea that the embryo is a "human life" is, morally speaking, quite unsound. This is because embryos have no moral value of their own. They are things which may, one day, become things of moral value, but that does not mean they are morally valuable now.
To take to your prisoner example, human beings have moral value even if they are savage criminals sentenced to life imprisonment. This is because they are conscious human beings who still have a right to life within our moral framework. Using them from scientific research sets a moral example that humans, in general, are usable in har
"To conclude, embryos have no inherent moral value. They only have moral value if you believe potential to have moral value gives something moral value, which I believe to be a kind of circular argument and a conflation of ideas."
Which would be a great argument if you were debating with a rational, scientific person. However, most of the objections come from people who have a religious orientation and some level of belief about association of a "soul" to the embryo (potential child). Miscarriage (many of which happen before the pregnancy is even evident) is a "natural" event and therefore within the realm of God. As in, you might not like it, but it's in God's plan and so it is acceptable. Deliberately creating and harvesting the embryos is not natural and not God endorsed.
(Disclaimer: These are not my beliefs, I am just illustrating that people who are anti stem cell research are not usually coming from a scientific perspective.)
Sometimes my arms bend back.