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Stem Cells in the Heart?
NewScientist reports that researchers have discovered stem cells in the heart, leading them to believe that the heart can regenerate itself. From the article: "The finding raises the possibility that these cardiac stem cells could one day be manipulated to rebuild tissues damaged by heart disease - still the leading cause of death in the US and UK. Because fully developed heart cells do not divide, experts have believed the organ was unable to regenerate after injury. But, in 2003, researchers at Piero Anversa's laboratory at New York Medical College in Valhalla, New York, US, discovered stem cells in the hearts of mice, and subsequently humans. However, they still did not know whether these stem cells actually resided in the heart or had merely migrated there from another tissue, such as bone marrow."
Well, since you aren't a researcher, lemme translate.
"Stem cells! Stem cells! Look, we found stem cells! Give us more grant money!"
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!
The big news is that the heart was thought that it couldn't repair itself after damage has occurred. Damage like minor heart attacks (which people often don't even know about, yet still have them) create scars on the heart. Over time, the build up of these scars reduces the hearts ability to function properly. Now we learn, that there may be new hope in a heart that could regenerate. Think of all the lives that could be saved. That's the big deal!
preventing heart atacks.
Curing heart diseases is undoutedly important and necessary, but understanding why and how we have heart diseases could lead to less such diseases in the first place.
The problem - and not only with heart related diseases - is that there are quite a lot of life-style related causes, isn't it so?
And changing behaviours (what you eat, how you exercise, how you relate to your fellow human beings etc) is presently more "difficult" (for cultural reasons) than discovering cell manipulation techniques, that is, than intervening (than making a "patch").
That is the tradition bestowed upon us at least since Francis Bacon: the world, including nature and the human body, are objects which we can manage, alter, change to suit our "needs", to extract profit etc, because we can.
Instead of adopting a humbler attitude towards life, the universe and everything, trying to live seamlessly with our environment and with each others, we learned to alter the world so that it would adapat to our whims. The eventual errors, mistakes and disasters that follow such courses of action are tackled with further and deeper interventions.
Is it possible to change centuries of an intervention tradition, to try to understand and adapt to the environment and others, instead of adapting others and the environment to us?
Am I making any sense?