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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.
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.
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"
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.
#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.
;)
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.
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
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.
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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