Slashdot Mirror
Bone Marrow Cells Repair Heart
Science Daily is reporting that Toronto researchers have discovered a method to utilize bone marrow cells in the repair of a damaged heart after a heart attack. From the article: "While it has long been known that bone marrow cells have the ability to clear the dead tissue after a heart attack, what has not been known until now is the critically important role of bone marrow adult stem cells in repairing a damaged heart, restoring its function and enhancing the growth of new blood vessels."
Yet again, adult stem cells are proven to work. That's where more of the research should be.
Is the whole genetically modified cells (which/what kind of cells?) going to be a problem for the religious types who fret about these things?
Only until their own mortality comes into question. At least, for most of them.
Is the whole genetically modified cells (which/what kind of cells?) going to be a problem for the religious types who fret about these things?
Every medical advance is a problem for the religious types who fret over it. The next generation will adapt their religion to accomodate practicality and then they can enjoy the benefits along with the rest of us. No harm done. It worked for transplants.
So, they are not alike. There are some clear differences. The main issue about adult cells is of course their potency, can one get to a cell that will differentiate to the desired tissue, and longevity -- is the telomeres already quite shortened. Research in both fields is a good thing, but let's not fool ourselves into thinking there are not pros and cons both ways.
This is actually old news, and companies already have clinical trials going utilizing adult bone marrow stem cells in this capacity. Look into any big, bone marrow stem cell company and you can find information on whats going on.
Because one involves butchering children. One does not have to be a "fundy" to recognize that an individual human being is an individual human being. In fact, it is all a matter of biology. Souls and God don't have anything to do with it.
Where were you when the voynix came?
Do we tend to produce less bone stem cells as we age? Are stem cells from older people less viable for repairs? Should we be freezing our stem cells when we're young?
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
Personally I find this strange too, but on the other hand.
If you have to make a choice between:
(a) possibly leaving this world sooner or (b) eternal damnation
and one does take ones religious reasons serious enough... I can actually imagine people preferring the second option.
My opinion is simply: 'if you do not hurt or risk the lives of other people you can choose whatever you want'... but when children enter the situation, this can become a very complicated issue.
This kind of stem cell research is no more regulated than any other sort of medical research. I think you have it confused with *embryonic* stem cell research (which is subject to a ban on federal funding).
In any case, the US has provided cures or vaccines for lots of diseases which have plagued the world. The USMC eradicated malaria in Cuba for example. Fat lot of good that did in terms of good will. It has never changed attitudes and never will because the people who hate the US typically couldn't give a flying fuck about their own people dying from disease, or any other cause.
Do you think the terrorists, who blow up civillians in their own country every day, will be impressed if the US cures AIDS? Most of them think that AIDS was cooked up by the Jews, or the Americans, or both.
To back my words there is another report form 2003 published in slashdot a couple of months ago: Stem Cells in the Heart?
It says
I suspect that some of those parents refused transfusions because they believed what the Bible said (in their eyes) was more likely to be right than the doctor. Not right morally but scientifically: The AIDS cases caused by transfusions were a powerful reinforcement of biblical infallibility in medical matters for those who already believed transfusions were prohibited. The fact that the number of these transmissions was statistically small at the time (except for hemophiliacs) and now almost zero does not matter; they think the risk of that and other similar unknown dangers are too high to risk.
It's not hard to find examples where doctors have been wrong about the safety of treatments in the past, so we know they are not infallible. The Bible on the other hand...
Silly as it seems, I have known people who held these views and tried to convince me of them. When you realize that many of the same people believe the Earth is under 10,000 years old and that there is no such thing as "macro evolution", you can understand how hopeless it can be to try to convince them their medical ideas are wrong.
a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)
If the private sector (I refuse to use the term "free market" - the US market is anything but unregulated!) is an adequate institution for making these kinds of decisions, and producing adequate research, then why do we even have any government funding of any kind?
The answer is that long ago people realized that the market tends to be rather risk averse, and often thinks in the short term. Also, no corporation in the US can match the amount of money the government throws around - what would be a staggering loss for a medium sized research company is very little for the government as a whole, allowing it to pursue very risky (but potentially beneficial) courses of research. Also, lack of shareholder pressure and legal liability allows the government to fund pure science that may never be "useful" (astrophysics, esoteric mathematics, etc).
Because tax money is being diverted from the private sector to the public sector to fund these things, the private sector has less to invest in potentially risky things as well, it is a self-perpetuating situation (which seems to be better than the alternative) and it is unlikely that we will see VCs stepping forward to work on embryonic stem cells in the US, especially if they must compete with government-funded research in the EU.
I won't argue the point of fetal vs. adult stem cells - it seems to me, as a layman, that most of the stories and successful research has happenned around adult stem cells. Whether this is because they are more easily available or because fetal stem cell research has been effectively halted in the United States, I don't know. Likely, it is former, as well as there being issues using fetal stem cell lines of any type for treatments - after all, if they were viable in any shape, we should be hearing more from overseas research. So far, not much has been heard, at least to my limited knowledge.
What I will argue about is regarding the reasoning for banning funding to researchers. It is one thing if a researcher wants money for such research and is denied. It is another thing if they want to do the research, but aren't allowed because they (or their lab/research facilities) currently do government funded research in a completely unrelated (to stem cells) area. Since they take government funds in some manner, for some research, they have the choice of losing all government funding to all research, to research fetal stem cells, or to not research fetal stem cell lines at all and keep what funding they have.
So, if you are a university (where a lot of research occurs), you are (nearly by default) receiving some form of government funding. Ergo, you cannot do fetal stem cell research (outside of the contaminated lines which were grandfathered in), without losing your government funding for your robotics lab (along with a bunch of other areas). It is either be completely self or privately funded for all areas of research, and be able to research fetal stem cell lines - or keep your government funding for your other research, and forget any fetal stem cell research. Some choice. No wonder private funding isn't available - because once your institution tried to do it, you would also need funding for all of your other research activities, which isn't going to happen, of course.
I guess we should all hope and pray that fetal stem cell lines continue to be fruitless pursuits, and that somebody outside of America doesn't make that primary discovery that proves to make adult stem cell research obsolete or worthless. Somehow, I think we as country are going to eat our shorts on that one, all because of ignorant, petty and baseless religious objections.
Religion will be humanity's downfall, and the fundamentalists will be leading the charge...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Heck, if the US developed a cure for cancer or AIDS and shared it with the world, maybe they would hate us less and stop killing our civilians.
More likely it would be used to sell people their own bone marrow for a profit.
Blessed are the 1337, for they shall pwn the earth.
You are partially correct in the government funding pure science, such as astrophysics, mathematics, etc. However, medical research is not really pure science. Yes, there is government funding, but most research grants come from industry. Why? Because, the grantor who pays for the research has claims to the patents. Let's say there is some great breakthrough in stem cells that can save millions of lives. What happens when the company wants to charge exhorbantant prices for the cure and it is found out that tax payer dollars paid for the research? Most government funded medical research has strings attached. The universities like it because it a) pays for staff and overhead and b) it attracts private research dollars. However, to turn that research into an actual cure takes business involvement and venture capital (if you are a small firm) or big bankroll if you are somebody like Merck. The government still subsidizes the process but through tax incentives, not grants.
That is why the universities are the ones who are complaining about the ban on federal funding of fetal stem cell research. There is nothing, however, to stop the Christopher Reeves Foundation, or the Bill Gates or anybody else to fund it, just not the federal government. The problem is that it is too speculative.
Proponents will say it is too speculative because we don't put enough research money into it. However, that is a bogus argument. The rest of the world does not share in the U.S. ban, and pours billions into it and still the science isn't there. All of the promise is with adult stem cells. Even the use of fetal stem cells is to get the undifferentiated cells to become differentiated, which by definition would be adult stem cells. The purpose of using fetal cells is the misconception that they would be easier to obtain (and for research they would but not for actual use).
What researchers need is a pure consistent strain of cells. Therefore if they can harvest the fetus for its stem cells and get them to multiply and differentiate into the cells they need, then they have a virtually unlimited supply of cells to test with. However, before they could turn anything into a cure, they have to deal with rejection and a slew of other problems. For this, the easiest thing is to use adult cells from the actual patient.
That is the beuaty of the Canadian procedure (if it works on humans). The could extract your bone marrow and use it to repair your heart. Since it is your cells produced by your body, there is no problem with typing and rejection that any other source would have.
To get this to work with fetal cells, they would first have to get the fetal cells to differentiate into stem cells that could repair the heart. That would prove the heart could be repaired (although Canada already proved that). Then they would have to figure out what stem cell they produced and whether they could harvest it from the patient. If so, great, if not, they'd have to try another type. Canada skipped all of the what if and went right to the likely candidate bone marrow.
It's this simplified research approach that has the VC drooling. Not only have there been over 100 "cures" and treatments already produced from adult stem cells, they are cheaper on the research side and cheaper on the treatment side (because of the rejection issues). For the VC, it's a win-win which fetal stem cells can't compete against.
As for the private sector's investment potential, one only needs to look at the profits of the pharmaceutical industry to see how lucrative it really is. If you have $100M to give as a grant to something that has a 30% chance of success (adult stem cell) or 3% (fetal stem cell) what would you invest in? The fact that they choose the adult stem cell research is why there is such a cry for federal funding. But shouldn't the government be putting it's (our) money where it has the greatest bang for the buck, too?
In the end, the debate is not about anything but money, big, big money. It's o