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First Embryonic Stem Cell Clinical Trial Imminent
An anonymous reader writes "California-based Geron has announced that the first embryonic stem cell trial may be in the not-so-distant future. Tom Okarma, Geron's CEO, recently announced that the company will be seeking permission from the FDA to begin clinical trials. From the article: 'Geron's plan is to treat people that have acute spinal injuries with oligodendrocyte progenitor cells grown from human ESCs. Oligodendrocyte cells support neurons in the brain and spine by sheathing them in myelin, a fat that helps neurons to transmit signals.'"
I don't really see that as a benefit. If I'm only drinking beer for the flavour, then I'm just as happy with non-alcoholic beer. If I'm drinking beer for the alcohol, then stem-cell enhanced alcohol resistance is not my friend; the ability to repair liver damage however....
Lose: misplace or fail || Loose: not bound together
Personally, I think we should just cut to the chase and start growing humans specifically to harvest the organs. Why not? As long as they don't achieve consciousness, what's the harm?
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
For example, will this lead to a cure for MS?
Then you should take the time to understand exactly what it is that this company is doing.
They are cloning embryonic progenitor stem cells, and while you might at first glance think they are killing babies or mothers to obtain those initial cells, they might not be. I'd be exceedingly surprised if they were, because there are laws against that sort of thing.
How about if they obtained the initial cells from umbilical cord blood? I don't believe that there is any way to turn unbilical cord blood into a human being, and it is material that might otherwise be discarded -- and usually is.
How about if they were using discarded unfertilized eggs to process and obtain a souce of cloneable material?
How about if they took stem cells from bone marrow and used those as the basis to produce cloneable embryonic progenitor cells?
Because IANAMB (I Am Not A Molecular Biologist), some of the possibilities I have suggested above are either not possible or not practical. But I suspect that more than one of those approaches is.
I do doubt very much that they are taking fertilized eggs from a viable womb to clone their embryonic progenitor cells.
I wonder, do you also oppose organ donors? It seems to me that is exactly what you are describing. An organ donor is life that has been created and destroyed, and then the useful parts reclaimed to allow someone else to continue to live. Granted, they were (probably) not killed in order to harvest the organs (unless you believe that living corpses like Terry Schiavo were "killed" when their life support hardware was turned off), but it seems to me that people in your line of belief oppose more the harvesting than the killing, as they are content to allow fertilized egges to be destroyed by natural means rather than harvested to save the lives of others.
Please research exactly what it is that this company is doing before you leap forward to oppose it.
But what I'm really afraid of is that, despite whatever scientific significance such a trial could have, the religious right will immediately jump on this and squelch it without giving it any sort of chance. At least, hopefully, we can get the scientific advances later from countries that are more willing to do the research.
What frightens me is that even with proven advances in adult stem cells, some people squelch it for research that has inherent problems with the body rejecting the cells. These people claim that anti-science religious groups are attacking them. Huh?
Hopefully the programmers are better than the current OS programmers. I know I wouldn't let Linux or Windows control me.
I know that our pharmacological community is more concerned with making a buck and keeping us sick then actually curing diseases.
That's a pretty ridiculous thing to say. Yes, pharmaceutical companies want to make a buck, but scientists are human beings and many of them are doing their best to create the best drugs they can to help people. To think that they're intentionally withholding drugs or not trying to cure diseases to keep making money is simply ridiculous and paranoid.
There are tons of people working to cure cancers, Parkinson's, AIDS, Alzheimer's, and other diseases. If you think otherwise, you don't know anything about medical research. The fact that these things aren't yet cured is not from a lack of trying. There's still a great deal about the human body we don't know. There's tons about stem cells we don't understand. The human body is so amazingly comlpex, it's incredible that we can do the things we can do already.
Remember, drug companies and researchers came up with a number of vaccines for diseases that no longer plague us. Bacterial infections are fatal about 1/1000th as often as they used to be, thanks to the work of drug companies.
Don't get me wrong, they're not charity organizations and I'm not trying to make them out to be that. They're trying to make money for their stockholders, and that's their job. The people who work for them are trying to cure diseases, though. That's their job.
Where would you draw the line in scientific research?
An interesting example is as follows:" A fluorescence-activated cell sorter. A cell passing through the laser beam is monitored for fluorescence. Droplets containing single cells are given a negative or positive charge, depending on whether the cell is fluorescent or not. The droplets are then deflected by an electric field into collection tubes according to their charge. Note that the cell concentration must be adjusted so that most droplets contain no cells and flow to a waste container together with any cell clumps."
The empirical scientists that correctly implement such challenging procedures are rarely mentioned.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
"I just would like to see us move into a future where some of the basic human ailments have been conquered."
;)
I don't think you'll ever be happy. We already live in the era when people have a good chance of living into old age. Time was, before antibiotics, almost half of all infants died before their first birthday. Of those people who made it past age 1, half of them died before age 30. So only about 25% of the people born ever made it to old age.
Here in the US, the average male life span is 75.2. Welcome to paradise
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Once the ability to think is achieved.
Cogito ergo sum
- "Scientia non habet inimicum nisp ignorantem"
That's a pretty ridiculous thing to say. Yes, pharmaceutical companies want to make a buck, but scientists are human beings and many of them are doing their best to create the best drugs they can to help people. To think that they're intentionally withholding drugs or not trying to cure diseases to keep making money is simply ridiculous and paranoid.
Sorry, it's not. Between a cure and a treatment, drug companies will pick the treatment. Those scientists might want to save the world, but they signed an NDA that might have them simply reduce the world's suffering through sustained use of a lesser product. The scientists don't make the research budget, they don't controll what gets kept under the lid.
And if you think drug companies are very ethical and always act in the best interest of the public, you need to read a bit more about their past actions.
You can't take the sky from me...
"Yes, pharmaceutical companies want to make a buck, but scientists are human beings and many of them are doing their best to create the best drugs they can to help people. To think that they're intentionally withholding drugs or not trying to cure diseases to keep making money is simply ridiculous and paranoid."
Well...
I'll certainly give the scientists their due. The question becomes how much control does the company have over the directions the scientists' research takes them?
Here's sort of how I see it: I have no doubts that the drug companies are hard at work attempting to develop an AIDS vaccine. Are they attempting to work on a cure? Because, let's face it, there are far more people who are concerned about getting AIDS and would like a vaccine than there are people who have AIDS. I'm sure the research that goes into an AIDS vaccine will immeasurably help to develop a cure. But which pill would you expect to see on the market first--the cure or the vaccine?
As callous as it sounds, time is the cure. Eventually all the people with AIDS will die, but with enough of the population vaccinated there will be no hosts and HIV will go extinct, much like smallpox, and much like polio should have by now (I'm looking at you, Nigeria). And, thanks to all the research done on treatments, those who do have AIDS will have a much longer and happier life than they might have otherwise. So you don't need a cure, just a vaccine.
If fetuses really require protection, just get them legally declared human beings from conception.
Ah, they already are... sometimes... and this is the big problem with this debate...
You see, a mother has the right to an abortion without it being declared murder but if you kill a woman who is pregnant for even a single day you'll get hit with two counts of murder. Isn't the double standard great? Basically, from a very legal standpoint the government has decided that depending on the mothers state of mind determines if a fetus is a human, the fetus itself is just a bystander.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
I am not "suggesting" I am saying that an underclass of society, "the unborn" are being abused.
I think most liberals would just like to let scientists do their jobs, holding to the ethical codes required by their grants and their universities. I think only the Republican side ties this issue to abortion. Since our side doesn't even think that such research rises to the level of abortion, it's a non-issue for us.
And clearly, a large number of scientists believe that embryonic stem cells hold promise that adult stem cells do not, claiming otherwise is just falsifying the evidence to try to support your side of the argument. But you shouldn't do that, argument from false premises is a meaningless waste of time.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking