Slashdot Mirror
OHSU Turns Mouse into Factory for Human Liver Cells
Oregon Health & Science University researchers have figured out how to turn a mouse into a factory for human liver cells that can be used to test how pharmaceuticals are metabolized. The technique, published in the journal Nature Biotechnology, could soon become the gold standard not only for examining drug metabolism in the liver, which helps scientists determine a drug's toxicity, but also can be used as a platform for testing new therapies against infectious diseases that attack the liver, such as hepatitis C and malaria.
Those of us with a touchpad or trackpoint seem to be out of luck.
Downside: after one of those treatments you'll have a craving for cheese and a fear of cats. Then again, for some people it might not be much of a difference ;)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
This sounds promising (if it's not marketing hyperbole), but I'm pretty sure PETA (and other fringe animal rights groups) won't like this.
These mice doing subtle and devious experiments on us - what will they think of next? SUddenly getting liver disease and then it goes away again. Sneaky, very sneaky
Now, if they'd just turn a rat into a factory for fava beans.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Who knows what they'll be able to do with a keyboard then. Everybody knows CLIs are more powerful than any GUI.
So this means I can drink as much beer as I want without fearing liver damage, right?!!
http://www.mobigamut.com/
We had this one project where one of the milestones required really heavy duty updates to the system. The database schema was being updated. The front end was being updated. The backend was being moved from crappy PHP code to elegant JSP code. If this were anything but our modus operandi, you'd consider it a major version upgrade, not just a point release.
Needless to say, we took all the precautions we could. We first integrated the system on our development server. We got a quarter of our users migrated to that before we called it stable enough to move to the staging server. At that point, we moved half the users over and things were humming.
It was when we took that last step and moved the system to the production servers that all hell broke loose. First, the database couldn't handle the load and started ignoring requests. Then the webserver started hiccuping and returned all sorts of invalid data. Finally, the client side programs did what they could to degrade gracefully, but without valid data our clients were totally useless.
Total system meltdown. And everything had worked so great up to the final step. If there was ever any proof for the saying "the proof in the pudding is in the eating", this was it.
We can create equivalent environments and simulate the conditions necessary for just about anything. Still, it isn't until you actually take the systems live (whether that be a stock exchange trading facilitation program, as in our case, or a medicine developed on mice rather than humans, like in the article) that you actually find out whether things work correctly or not.
Luckily for our team, our manager took the brunt of the fall and only he and the lead developer got canned. If it's your life we're talking about though, there aren't any second chances.
As they say, "Liver let die". Sorry.
I'm sure PETA, RSPCA etc will all have something to say about this. But i see it less immoral that we're using mice (at their expense) to end human suffering rather than to test cosmetics or kill simply because they're in our home. At least this kind of animal cruelty (as it could be construed) has a negating good karma benefit.
The difference between your bad analogy & what tbe OHSU team are doing?
The OHSU team know wtf they're doing. Your team obviously didn't.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
22213 88872 15399 90172 87788 88872 89888 16221
77798 15262 55656 10142 77798 56561 13362 00000
...whose first thought was "Great, a spare liver on my desk."?
I think it's not healthy that your first association with "mouse" is an input device and not a furry rodent. Guess it's time to check whether that yellow ball is still on top of that blue room.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The giant mouse looked like this and it stole my cookie.
If the idiots at PITA didn't care more for a mouse than it did human life. They would realize that if we were not testing on these mice the mice would never even have been born.
I'm not much of a PETA supporter. I think that avoiding cruelty to animals is important, but I strongly object to the idea that we have no right to make use of them for food or for research into medicines that save human lives. However, I would like to point out that this line of reasoning is nigh-irrelevant in the context of their beliefs about the inherent rights of animals. Let me ask a simple, devil's advocate question to illustrate why:
Wouldn't this same justification for mistreatment apply to people born into slavery thanks to forced breeding?
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
My PhD was in this area and I know the guy who led this research. We've heard it all before, this is just spin to help 'Yecuris', the startup company selling this research. It's not particularly new or exciting and we are as far away today from having a viable replacement for real human hepatocytes in the lab as we've ever been.
Confessor: (very slowly and painfully) Well it's not a question of wantiing to be a mouse... it just sort of happens to you. All of a sudden you realize... that's what you want to be.
... started handing ... cheese around ... and well just out of curiosity 1 tried a bit ... and well that was that.
... and then when they'd got the costumes on they started ... squeaking.
... with other mice.
Interviewer: And when did you first notice these... shall we say... tendencies?
Confessor: Well... I was about seventeen and some mates and me went to a party, and, er... we had quite a lot to drink... and then some of the fellows there
Interviewer: And what else did these fellows do?
Confessor: Well some of them started dressing up as mice a bit
Interviewer: Yes. And was that all?
Confessor: That was all.
Interviewer: And what was your reaction to this?
Confessor: Well I was shocked. But, er... gradually I came to feel that I was more at ease
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
I'm sure the mouse feels terribly proud to be born with a fucked-up liver just so it can be repeatedly operated upon during its short but oh-so-meaningful life to provide alien cells to possibly save the lives of a few humans taking overpriced drugs from profit-obsessed corporations, to deal with conditions likely caused by their own overconsumption and excesses.
Yeah, if I were one of those crippled mice I'd be terribly proud. I know that as a member of the species responsible for engineering these Jem'Hadar-like mice dependent upon this ketracel-white-like NTBC, I'm also terribly proud.
If YOU had and inherited liver disease... wait, did you say Jem'Hadar? You mean... they are fearsome warriors armed with intergalactic travel and energy weapons?! Well, why didn't you say so -- that's completely different!
I, for one, would like to welcome our new mouse overlords!
Wasn't it liver cells that they injected into other mice to give regeneration? So... if they can make the mice make human liver cells...
isn't the Human Liver a factory for Human Liver cells ?
shouldn't they be doing research into organs that don't regenerate by themselves?
They're using their grammar skills there.
"I'm sure the mouse feels terribly proud to be born with a fucked-up liver just so it can be repeatedly operated upon during its short but oh-so-meaningful life to provide alien cells to possibly save the lives of a few humans taking overpriced drugs from profit-obsessed corporations, to deal with conditions likely caused by their own overconsumption and excesses."
Makes my blood boil to see self obsessed pricks in the developed world bang on about issues like this.
Look further than the end of your own nose and I'm sure you'll see the terrible human cost of these diseases.
If a moose dies to provide a cure for malaria, is that right? No then take a look at the static's for global malaria deaths, eclipses AIDS by a huge factor.
1 mouse ? 10 mice? 10 000 000 million mice? I'd personally kill every fucking mouse on this planet to save one 112 year old crack addict, let alone the thousands of children killed or orphaned by malaria each year
Grow up
You need look no further than your own nose to see who's self-obsessed in this room, buddy... it's called homo-centrism. Or perhaps in your case, even xenophobia.
I should never visit any Slashdot threads touching on animal experimentation, because I am always sickened by what I find. One or two people will post thoughtful comments, debating the intersection of human medical and animal suffering. Unfortunately, these are drowned out by a chorus screaming that living creatures should be viewed only as a means to human ends. There is no thought or analysis put into these posts; they evince only selfishness and a grotesque sense of entitlement.
These posts, and how they are moderated, also reveal a disturbing group psychology. Cruel jokes about the victims, caricatures of opponents (if you hesitate about this sort of thing, you must be a frothing PETA nut) - these sort of distancing techniques have led down some terrible paths. If your reaction to this news goes no further than "lol next they'll say we can't eat carrots", it might be time to re-evaluate a few things.
For all we know the moon may be as conscious as a poet or a realtor, and extremely weary of its monotonous round. - HLM
Of course they will. Obviously, you've never tried human liver with fava beans and a nice chianti. It's delicious.
I'm more worried by the newer diseases like hepatitis C++.
...the Internet is turning computer mice into bacteria factories.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
There is a reason OHSU is known as the MIT for mad scientists :-)
. . . I'll drink to that!!
True :-)
:-)
OHSU also have a really kewl hill side campus and kick-butt aerial tramp! It looks like a swiss ski village meets the ivory tower
I wish they would have excepted me :-(