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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!
which renders its victims blind and speechless before finally paralyzing them and killing them...
Sounds like marriage.
"I'm sure there is no threat to anyone's identity," said Arthur Caplan, director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Bioethics. "But we are starting down that road."
Is this guy suggesting that you could change a person's identity by injecting stem cells into their brain? It brings the idea of brainwashing to a whole new level.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
Though there's legitimate ethical debate on abortions, I don't think this is much different than having your organs donated after you die.
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTI CLE_ID=46546
I have issue with this statement. The question is: -
Is it possible to make "human matter" from non-human matter? I doubt. With this kind of reasoning, I am beginning to doubt whether we as a human race actually understand when life begins. Again, using this kind of reasoning, a scientist could argue that sperm(s) cannot be anything human since these immature neural cells are not human matter at all anyway. But we all know that sperm(s) help form what is known as human beings today.
Aside from ripping the first four paragraphs verbatim, it says ITFA:
"What's more, some of the brain cells to be implanted will be derived from aborted fetuses, which Caplan also said raised ethical concerns for some."
so the whole misdirection of not being embrionic is "technical" in nature for the right-to-life crowd.
Anyway, it all seems academic until you read the bit at the bottom about the fellow who is going to enroll his 5 year old son, in hopes of not having to see his child die a horrible, slow death right in front of his eyes, with nothing he can do to save him. I think you have to be a parent to understand the enormity of the situation - I know for a fact that before I had a child, I wouldn't have experienced that "oh, my god" sinking feeling when reading his comments. I hope it works, and I fear that it works.
Why do I fear that it works? Politics. If it works, there will be a "cure" for this horrible affliction. And it will likely require stem cells from pre-term fetuses, at least initially. If there's only one thing I can think of that's worse that seeing your child die slowly and painfully in front of you while you can't do anything to help, it would be having your child die slowly and painfully in front of you, knowing that there is a cure and not being able to get the cure. The fact that it would be the "religious" right that would block you from saving your own child is just and extra bone to try and swallow.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
George is looking forward to his first human brain cells.
I agree about the Koreans, but this is a Palo Alto-based biotech company, not those guys.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
How long before we get some kind of lame-ass movie story about someone who receives donor brain cells from an unborn embryo and rapidly become EvIl InCaRnAtE?
Finally a use for my sliver of Hitler's brain! These six children will be the new Boys of Brazil!
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.
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...
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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Sure, even if you believe a fetus is a human being - if it comes to one life for another, the potential to be a human shouldn't surpass an actual, living human in need of help! The counterclaim has sometimes been: We aren't gods! Giving life to Jimmy at the expense of the fetus is arrogance in the face of God! Wait a moment - when has it not been ok to choose one life over another? Where was the religious right during the cold war? Or the Iraq war? Or capital punishment? Surprise - life vs life decisions are made all the time, for a variety of reasons, convenience among others - by those same people who will tell you that they can't choose in the case of "fetus 4971 Vrs Jimmy"
Now that would be a whole new take on "branfucked."
"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.
It is an interesting therapeutic strategy to inject stem cells foreign to the suffering patient to alleviate the problems with the patient's own DNA. The cause of Batten Disease is a series of mutations in membrane transporters with unknown function. While the mutations affect all body tissues, it is powerfully destructive to neurons and so there is the typical accumulation of autofluorescent pigments (the so-called ceroid lipofuscinosis neuronal).
:-)
I think the most important lesson here is that injection of stem cells and the differentiation of those cells and eventual incorporation into the functional neural network is astounding. However, the limits of the therapy are quite evident, since the patient's entire brain suffers from the accumulation of lipofuscin. You'd have to inject enough stem cells to regenerate an entire brain, which is on the scale of billions (could be off by a few factors of ten though....).
As for the cellular and genetic basis for the accumulation of pigments, I'll have to get back to you on that when I conclude my research.
I am defenseless. Use your button. Mod me down with all of your hatred.
Whether you agree with this or not this should strike you as an enormous event likely of the millennium should this be successful. This single event may open the doors to ethical debates we've only seen the tips of, and in the end it may not just stop at words, but violence. One side would argue that violence is already occurring just to do it at all.
Reading at high threshold levels is group-think.
You are also guilty in the other direction. The article avoided the political-right-religious inflamation while you purposefully have fanned it. Points to ponder:
- Most "religious right" groups and people that are against using aborted fetuses as sources for medical procedures recognize that there are special circumstances when execptions to a "no abortion" rule are warrented.
- The source article at CNN and the Wikipedia article on Batten disease both point out that the neural tissue can be and is collected from natural miscarriages too.
Therefore, both of the above, even if an almost "no abortion" law was in effect, would be able to provide sufficient neural tissue for the treatment of a rare disease.
Your opinions on doing what it takes to save your children are laudable. No need to fan the religious flames in this case since I doubt you would be effected by it.
#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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Can we volunteer upper management for a brain cell injection? I think there are plenty of people in the office willing to chip in to cover the costs. Even if this does not fix them it would keep them from making stupid decisions for a short period of time while they are in the hospital.
;)
Is this going to cut down on the number of duplicate stories on Slashdot?
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
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Natural selection has had its turn. Now it's time for intelligent design to give it a shot.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor
I'm not gonna lie and say "this is totally wrong!" but I still don't think it is right.
My point:
The fetus is not a being-in-itself, it is enroute, developing into a human. it has the potentiality of humanity but not an actual humanity, so thus it is a being-for-itself. Now only humans are being-for-itself; so there is a contradiction here.
The dying child is a human, being-for-itself, it has the potentiality of a dead being, but the actuality of an alive being. All being strive become a being-in-itself, death is this state for this child. Thus the child dying will reach it's goal of life by dying.
Thus I deduce two points:
1) Doing nothing places each being into their respective roles. Granted once the first child is human they will gain another potentiality as a side-effect of being-for-itself. But each child is in their logical, unaltered, natural states.
2) Is anything accomplished by exchanging roles? No. Of course parents are going to say otherwise, but they are bias.
on a second note, I envy the dying child. From a philisophical point of view they are the most lucky of us.
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.
Or perhaps sperm cells combined with ova outside of the womb?
Nope, sorry. Religious right folks usually have a problem with this one too, especially if the sole purpose of the embryo is to be destroyed. There are lots of arguments over whether or not to use existing embryos from fertility clinics, and your idea would be (if you believe using already-made embryos is wrong) even worse.
As for just sperm cells...well, if that worked, everything would be a wee bit too easy, cause we got no shortage of those.
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I'm probably going to get flamed straight to Hell by the hardcore left fanatics but I'm still posting. Unpopular opinion is still protected by the first amendment.
When I read this my stomach essentially sank. Anyone who thinks this is absolute right vs absolute wrong doesn't know what they're talking about.
What the moral issue here is, is that it's essentially harvesting of human life. A human fetus is essentially a human child that has developed to the point of posessing organs, human shape and a brain. Essentially a viable human life at this point. In fact this leads to partial birth abortion in a way.
You see partial birth abortion is essentially using a probe to kill a human fetus in the womb then extracting it. This is done with fetuses that are viable human lives once removed, thus must be killed before removal or it is considered a living human child.
In short this is the equivilent of killing a newborn baby with the only difference being location. That however isn't the subject of this post and I'll move on.
The article wasn't entirely clear but I'm suposing this is more likely early term fetuses not yet viable as living once removed, however it's dangerously close.
It is a good thing that there's a method of saving human lives, and yes it's natural for one to place one's self in the situationo f the parents of these children. However that's the case of parental instinct to choose one's own offspring over another.
Would you honestly hesitate to kill someone else's child to save your own? This is essentially the case. Any attempts to justify things into black and white are nothing more than attempts to convince one's self. Lions will sometimes kill the offspring of other lions in order to mate with the mothers and produce their own young. It's the same underlying primal instinct behind the very heated statements before this post.
If placed in the same situation I would probably make the natural descision to save my own young at the expense of another. However I'm not going to put myself in that position and rather should make a logical choice as a third party. As a third party without emotional attachment, and assuming we are dealing with a viable human life on the other side the two sides stand roughly equal.
In this case the side with a parent willing to take another life in order to save their child's life, against the child with a parent looking rather to avoid becoming a parent (and obviously not considering the option of adoption, which puts infertile couples on multi year waiting lists and continues to fund america's abortion industry), yes the parent willing to take one life to save their child's when met with no oposition will succeed every time.
Much in the way herd animals will allow their young to be chased down and killed by predators in order to save themselves, as a breeding age, healthy animal has a better chance of reproducing than a still vulnerable calf that is until it's an adult, still expendable.
But let's look at the human side of this now. Let's forget baser animal instincts and use that intellect that sets us apart from predators and prey. If you put a logical argument of life vs life, you can't so easilly come with a right answer. You have your animal instinct that gives you a gut answer, or you have the religious right with an imposed super-ego which gives them an automatic gut answer in the oposite direction.
If we were going strictly by Darwinism, it would be better to allow the healthy unborn child to live, while allowing the child with a genetic defficiency to die. However don't confuse me as stating that that is the morally right answer.
In terms of human morality, which exists somewhere undefinable between our base insticts, our concious intellect, and our ingrained super-ego, there isn't a clear right answer.
Human morality dictates that human life be valued equally. An individual with a genetic defficiency has as much right to live as a healthy individual. Even
If this works, maybe they'll eventually get round to doing the same for disabled adults with progressive forms of multiple sclerosis, like myself. I'd appreciate if they hurry up - typing this with two fingers on my left hand kinda shows that I'm already moderately far gone :-/
Fingers (on my now-useless right hand) crossed for the kids involved. At least my illness won't kill me real soon.
Lemon curry?
Can they program X360 to transfer any ATM transactions to a private bank????
So, any prospect of a genetic test that can be done in utero before, say, 10-12 weeks gestation? I gather you're not talking a SNP, more's the pity, but a good genetic test would be a God-send. It's hideous to abort your 3-month-old fetus, but nothing compared to watching your little boy or girl die.
Well, the ultimate fear from increasingly successful transplantation therapies is hardly political. Grab Larry Niven's short story "The Jigsaw Man," if you haven't read it already, for a preview of what might happen in (say) AD 2090 when your /. karma falls to "Terrible"...
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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This will be a long story, I am kinda dumping my feelings and my memory here. It is the only way I know how to express myself when it comes to this subject.
In the late 1960's my father developed kidney disease - his kidneys stopped functioning and basically turned to stone. As unfortunate as this was for him, it really was a good time to get the disease. There was a great deal of research being done in the field and "kidney machines" were far enough advanced so that he was able to lead a somewhat comfortable life. He was placed on "the list" to wait for a transplant and went to dyalisis three times a week. The "machine" was both friend and enemy, it made him feel better and allowed him to function enough to be home most often but occasionally there were complications, sometimes pretty severe and he'd end up in the hospital for days or even weeks.
Then, in the middle of the night a call came, he had "matched" and a kidney was on it's way from the East Coast for him. The operation went well and within a few weeks he was home. He was being treated with "exparamental" anti-rejection drugs and seemed quite healthy and normal. He expected to even be able to get a job again (he had never really quit working but had always taken short term jobs that he could complete in a day or two).
One day we were at a family reunion and he started acting funny. My mom drove him to the hospital where we learned that he had a stroke that was caused by blood clots breaking away from his transplanted kidney. He was in rejection and the kidney had to be removed to save his life. What we ultimately learned was that some blood cells from the horse that was used to make the anti-rejection serum made it through the filtering process and entered his body where the healthy kidney detected them and tried to filter them out. This is what caused the blood clots and what led to the rejection.
Many years after dad had died, we learned that this rejection had been "covered up" and that the drug which showed so much promise for so long to so many had hurt other people as well. There was a lawsuit and the doctor and staff responsible were punnished. But that is neither here nor there to me.
The rejection was terrible. He first had a stroke, then heart problems, followed by further strokes and more hear problems. He spent months in the hospital in an isolation room, too sick to be on the ward with other sick paitents.
Dad went back on "the list" when he got well enough and eventually was given another kidney. This time he was treated with other exparamental anti-rejection drugs and did very well although his other health problems continued to plauge him. He was pretty much unable to work (he still tried earning some cash though, running a lawn service, selling vegitables and so on). His trips to the hospital were now routine, once or twice a month, mostly for monitoring. He continued to recive various medical treatments and pills that were considered exparamental and lived a limited but comfortable life for six more years, eventually dying from heart failure at 49 (the age I am now).
There is no doubt in my mind that medical research extended my dad's life by at least ten years. Most of that time was at least somewhat comfortable. He got to see me marry and he got to see one of his grandchildren. I know what that meant to him. Hell, I know what it meant to me.
My father was a voulinteer for almost any research that came his way. The truth of the matter is that he was not included in any reseach that did not hold more promise than the alternitives available in conventional medicine. He also felt that furthering science was as much a paitent's responsibility as it was a doctor's. Sure there were risks involved but the alternitive was just as bad or worse.
There were at the time moral implications being discussed regarding the harvesting of human organs. Dad would have died much earlier if he had not had the two transplants he had. It is as simple as that to me and that is
The most ironic part is that when (not if) humanity gets to the point where we're creating new life forms from scratch and are essentially Intelligent Designers, it will all have arrived out of natural selection granting us intelligence and us using that intelligence to create.
Could get into some weird kinda feedback loop there if our creations ever make creations of their own...
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The word you are looking for is eugenics. I had trouble thinking of the word, so I did a search on relevant terms. http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=social+%22nat ural+selection%22+sterilization
In the United States, 24 states passed sterilization laws and Congress passed a law restricting immigration from certain areas deemed to be unfit.
Those who seem to object most to the use of human stem cells are the self-styled "born again" Christian Right, championed by the likes of GW Bush and his cronies. Their arguement is that the process of harvesting immature stem cells kills a human being with a God-given soul, making it an unspeakable act of murder. However, the ultimate outcome of this harvesting is saved or greately improved human lives. However, these same Christian Right-to-lifers seem not at all fazed by the fact that, in their zeal to target terrorists in far-flung corners of the globe occasionally innocent human lives (with God-given souls and all) are sacrificed. In this instance, the outcome of these actions can only be death and suffering, whether they manage to precisely hit their targets or not. Am I off-base/off-topic here? I look forward to replies... Cheers
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