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FDA Approves First Brain Stem Cell Transplant
no reason to be here writes "An article at CNN.com is reporting on the FDA granting approval to the first ever transplant of fetal stem cells into human brains. The stem cells will be transplanted into six children suffering from Batten disease, a rare, always fatal, genetic neurological illness, which renders its victims blind and speechless before finally paralyzing them and killing them." From the article: "The stem cells to be transplanted in the brain aren't human embryonic stem cells, which are derived from days-old embryos. Instead, the cells are immature neural cells that are destined to turn into the mature cells that makeup a fully formed brain. Parkinson's disease patients and stroke victims have received transplants of fully formed brain cells before, but the malleable brain cells involved here have never before been implanted."
This could be an amazing step forward for the advance of this field of science, or an amazing step backwards for it. The question isn't whether or not it'll work, it's how it will be handled by everyone involved. It won't take much to make enemies on here!
The title is a bit ambiguous isn't it? Brain stem, or stem cells, or brain stem stem cells?
But I thought that the thing that made stem cells special was that they could be encouraged to grow into any other type of human cell? Or are there special stem cells just for brains, brain stems, or spinal nerves?
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
I fear the politics too, but I have to admit to a nasty little surge of glee at the thought of the "pro-life" crowd getting their hypocrisy and self-righteousness thrown back in their faces in such a dramatic manner.
Just to make it clear where I'm coming from: I'm a parent too, and although my child is healthy and will hopefully remain so her whole life, I can tell you that if she ever does need some kind of treatment that someone objects to on religious grounds, that someone had better stay the hell out of my way.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
sometimes you have to just stop and think about the magnitude of scale something like this is. Just incredible. We are very fortunate to live in this time, I can't wait to see what happens this century, hopefully we can avoid blowing ourselfs up before we start discovering the really cool stuff...
It's hard to tell with such a brief quote, but it sounds like he's talking about chimera type issues. For example, if you know individual A's brain cells will develop in a defective way, you could try replacing them (at an early stage of development) with brain cells from individual B.
What I don't understand is why, after we've been told how important it is to use undifferentiated stem cells from embryos, these people are doing human trials with stem cells from aborted fetuses. Even if we disregard the source of the cells, and even if we consider that the humans subject have a fatal disease, there are serious ethical issues here.
Doctors have been injecting fetal nerve cells into the brains of patients with Parkinson's disease since the 1980s. It was claimed -- anecdotally -- to provide some improvement. But when blinded experimental trials were finally performed in the late 1990s, it was found that, if anything, the treatment actually makes the patients' condition worse.
Linkage:
"Parkinson's Research is Set Back by Failure of Fetal Cell Implants" (New York Times article)
"No Symptomatic Benefit in Second Fetal Transplant Double-Blind Trial" (description by 'E-MOVE' of a conference report)
All the good comments aside, could this end up like a cure for the terminally stupid?
If its possible to cure brain diseases with this process(s), couldn't you also fix things like bad memory? or turn people in to 'lawn mower men' kind of people? What happens when you augment the wetware of 'normal' people? Would they stop smoking? Could you break peoples ingrained habits with a wetware upgrade?
The implications are way more than anyone has mentioned yet...
If you look at human minds/brains as a wetware machine, then some very odd thinking patterns have been (more or less) shown to be wetware problems (epilepsy etc.) and if that is so, can we cure all kinds of psychosis with a wetware upgrade? How does that affect our views of god, humanity, and disease? What if we can make people smarter than Einstein? Science fiction stories have had fields days with this kind of stuff.
If we can augment or repair natural decay, could we also tinker with the endocrine system in general? Perhaps diabetes is just a failed ROM chip initially? Would Thyroidism just be a Flash chip change?
This is indeed exciting, but also very scary. We have had stories about countries not getting enough vaccines for aids and now H5N1 etc. What kind of abuses can this lead to, and how do we set out rules for how this sort of thing should be dealt with?
All we need is one Dr Moreaux (sp) to mess up and everything could get very whacked out indeed.
I'm rather perplexed at the implications.
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I had a problem with this as well. You are esentially injecting a foreign substance into a developing brain--"immature neural cells that are destined to turn into the mature cells that makeup a fully formed brain." They have a different DNA so how this affects the body's response to these cells is questionable. The immune system might think these cells are some form of a threat to the body and so it would try to kill them. On the other hand, if they develop into functioning brain cells, how will the foreign DNA neural cells function with local DNA cells? The inserted neural cells will be able to produce the enzyme necessary to "help dispose of brain cellular waste," but how will that help the brain cells that can't produce this enzyme? The may as well still die so you will have this "foreign brain" in somebody else's body. Frightening.
"You're everywhere. You're omnivorous."
advancements in these life-saving feilds always seems to get stunted by idiotic activists and religious people, somehow saving lives offends god and we should stop it.
don't mod this funny, because it's not.
#0 This is a major advance that we are at the point of being able to do this type of experiment; the more we learn about our bodies the better our lives will be.
#1 I think the rights of the living out weight the rights of the unborn.
#2 Let's be honest, EVERY medical advance for the last 500 or 1000 years was SEEN AS moral "issue" for those deeply religous including most Christians. I think they are all ethnically bankrupt for accepting ANY modern medical treatment. True Christians should take the point of view of the Christian Scientist movement and leave ANY healing in GODS hands; to do anything LESS than that, is not to accept both GOD and Jesus.
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I think the pro-lifers would call this an essentially semantic evasion. Fertilization is fertilization, no matter where it happens. If you believe that life begins at conception, this would not be a way around it, because a human life is still theoretically being conceived.
There was an article in WIRED a couple of months ago about a biologist who wanted to engineer genetically incomplete humans specifically for the purpose of harvesting stem cells. Essentially, they would be genetically-engineered embryos that would be missing some component vital to further development. I don't remember the doctor's name, but he claimed to be very much "pro-life", but he hoped that this would somehow please both pro-lifers and the scientists who wanted to expand the research and use of stem cells. Personally, I just found the whole prospect deeply creepy.
Interesting, though, that the "moral furore" over in vitro fertilization seems to have been largely dropped.
If my parents had decided to use birth control, I would not be here today and would never have been able to feel or think; if my parents had decided on an abortion, I would likewise not be here today and would never have been able to feel or think. To me, there's no difference in the sadness level of the two scenarios.
Since when do you care about the death of another child? Since when does anyone? I ordered a PowerMac the other day. I didn't really need one, but they looked cool. I could have taken that money and given it to a starving kid in Bangladesh (my native country). The average Bengali works 5 years to accumulate that much money, and you can bet it would have saved at least one life. With my lack of concern, I basically allowed somebody to die. At a logical level, it is no different than if I had let someone get hit by a bus, without trying to warn them or push them out of the way. It might not have the same emotional impact, but at an abstract level, it is no different. This is a poignant, yet somehow painless truth.
What am I getting at? That we're all evil for letting children starve? No! We cannot live our lives shackled to the destinies of others. We cannot torture ourselves for the good we could do but do not. We are only human, we're not built to care for other people in that way. You claim to care about human life, but would you sacrifice your comfort to preserve it? Would you sacrifice a nice home for your family, a nice school for your children, your gas-guzzling, environment-polluting car, or even your trifling conveniences and luxuries? Would you sacrifice any of these things? There are some people who do, and while we admire such people at an intellectual level, almost none of us are willing to follow their example.
It is for this reason that I find the "pro life" argument disturbing. Here are people who allegedly care about life, yet, they spend an enormous amount of effort (and a not-insignificant amount of money), fighting for "abstract people", while letting "concrete people" die every day. I can't see how anybody can rationalize that. It makes no sense at a concrete level, or at an abstract level.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Although it's obviously a flamebait, he has some points.
It's genetic desease. So what if "cured" man wants to have offspring? Will his children need the same operation too? Who gonna pay for that?
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