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MIT Team Creates Cancer Stem Cells
MIT scientists and colleagues have found a way in the lab to create large amounts of cancer stem cells, the cells that can initiate tumors. The work, reported in the August 13 issue of Cancer Cell, could be a boon to researchers who study these elusive cells. Labs could easily grow them for use in experiments.
Now we just need to to infect the top seven world leaders with it and we'll have a cure. (MAD TV reference)
Might work as a covert assassination weapon if they can get hold of the mark's DNA and create cell lines.
-b.
I used to carry a bottle of whiskey for snake bite. And two snakes. -Nefarious Wheel
"No good will come of this".
... oh my.
:)
I got images of various "Resident Evil" scenes with zombies flooding the Northeast US and
On a serious note, kudos to the lab geeks at MIT! You guys do some fantastic work
It's just you. Just because they made some small technical advance and then ran to the media with it doesn't mean anything. Before this comes out, just wait for the super efficient solar cells, face recognition, robot servants, super nanotube application (fill in here), gene therapy that doens't kill helpless teenagers, fusion on the desktop, and god knows how many other vaportechnologies.
Terrance: What are you doing?
Scott: I am wishing cancer upon you.
Phillip: What?
Scott: I am giving you cancer with my mind.
Phillip: No, don't give me cancer!
and look what happened....
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
This actually brings up an interesting idea.
I've always been a proponent of the idea that scientists were the true moral crusaders of our age, not protesters, demonstrators, and certainly not religious zealots.
Think of it this way - when scientists have perfected a means for reproducing reliable and testable human cancer cells in a laboratory, there will no longer be any need to use lab rats in cancer research. Cancer will be closer to being cured, and rats will be spared. What has the Animal Liberation Front done on that magnitude, apart from burn medical research facilities?
I imagine that when we are able to create vehicles that produce no pollution, it will be considered excessive and morally repugnant to drive gas guzzlers. I imagine that we have developed a means of engineering meat that it will be considered immoral to kill living animals to get it. The idea here is that immorality is scaled and determined in terms of gross excess of what is necessary for survival, and that our technology makes survival easier (thus altering the scale).
Inserting [insert witty signature here] here does not constitute a witty signature.
Has to be tailored to each person. At that it's highly questionable. Otherwise the body will just destroy the cells. Cancer lives by playing the game of cups, and balls with the immune system. When it finds the right way to act like it's part of the body to the immune system it's kind of a bitch to kill off. Easier to just poison someone. Plus this would require a fairly advanced lab. It takes far less, and generates allot more fear mailing an envelope with Anthrax in it to one person.
call me crazy, but usually you have to have a ready supply of the thing you're trying to cure in order to study it, in order to cure it. where is the ready supply of cancer? oh yes, growing in people. This seems like a better option.
"Hey we made cancer airborne and contagious! You're welcome! We're Science. We're all about coulda not shoulda."
- Patton Oswalt - Werewolves & Lollipops
You beat me to asking the very same question, I look forward to the replies that will follow.
This all seems really really...creepy
And before someone goes off about how every modern advancement of science has been called creepy by some activist group or individual...you have to admit...this takes it to a whole new level.
Not really, you would need the cells to be immunologically compatible to each person you wanted to infect. That would be harder than a large number of other ways to hurt them. On the other hand, a biological weapon could come from the method they use to turn the cells into cancer stem cells. This generally involves a gene transfer using a virus vector. That kind of virus could be used to create these types of cells inside someone. I don't think large scale virus vector weapons are currently feasible but it may be something to worry about in the future.
"Hello, Husband. How was work? I made you a cup of your FAVORITE COFFEE. It's fresh... Now drink up. Drink it ALL... Feel anything? No? You will in a few years."
Hooray! Try new Instant Cancer! 50% faster than regular cancer. Available at your grocer's dairy case.
Wasn't that the plot of Mission Impossible 2?
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
It's hard to remember the plot details. But I remember a lot of slow motion.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Russell Crowe: Well, we couldn't find cancer, but we found a man with cancer. *Punches old man* Take that, cancer! And that! *Punches again*
And you forgot to mention robot vacuum cleaners (that don't get stuck everywhere - personal experience), penis enlargers (I've still got my hopes up), bacteria that eat toxic waste and poop gold, Hurd, new storage method X that promises petabyte drives (our company expects them to be on the market in less than a year), nanorobot swarms, and the new Apple iCar (ooops I shouldn't have mentioned that I am an Apple employee. Wouldn't want to create a lot of rumors and speculation.)
Eureka! All we have to do to cure cancer is take this machine and reverse the polarity!!!
I'm not sure why, but I found this funny enough to laugh at. --- Cancer cells, buy them today. They're ammonia and fat-free now.
Heh.
Well, you know, all these cures for cancer in mice made a market for an uncure. We all should have seen this coming.
I'm a she-slashdotter... but I make up for it by living with my folks.
I think she meant fusion on the desktop that would be a viable powersource.
What's the point of that??? Ok, now I have to leave my office... Time for a cigarrete!!
...that bringing more cancer cells into the world makes people happy.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Then it's nothing to worry about. There's no possible way anybody could get a sample of a slashdotter's DNA.
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
Seriously, half the items under your kitchen sink can probably be used by terrorists. In fact does your home have natural gas running to it? Seal that house up, start a leak, light a long fuse... I think I've found out that you own a Weapon of Mass Neighborhood Destruction!!!! How do you sleep at night?
Is anyone taking bets on how long before the first report of a critic of Vladimir Putin feeling a pinprick on the subway, followed some months later by cancer and death?
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
So does this mean that they will be able to grow new organs from these cells but those will already have cancer and will only be somewhat useful? I know, RTFA.
If I went around claiming I was an emperor...they'd put me away!
This seems like a better option.
Well, the difference is that these are cancer stem cells. Cancer seeds, not cancer. From the article:
MIT scientists and colleagues have found a way to create in the lab large amounts of cancer stem cells, or cells that can initiate tumors.
If you could find a way to kill the seeds, then perhaps all the other techniques we are working on to kill the tumors will become irrelevant. Maybe the seeds are easier to kill than the tumors they sprout into. Prevention is the best medicine, after all.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
even these new stem cells.
"To be is to do." --Socrates
"To do is to be." -- Aristotle
"Do-Be-Do-Be-Do..." --Sinatra
Why am I so certain the Apple iCar would have one pedal, and you'd have to press a modifier button (on the steering wheel?) to use the brake?
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
How do you sleep at night>
On top of a pile of money, with many beautiful women
HPV and other naturally occurring viruses cause cancer quite nicely. Of course, if you want a viral weapon, why not use Ebola which you don't have to wait years to see an effect? I realize mad scientists come in all sorts of colors and flavors, but killing people with cancer seems awfully slow (unless your country has a cure for cancer and others don't).
It might take months or years to kill.
In that sense its a lot like AIDS was before there were any drugs. You knew you had a fatal time bomb in you but didnt quite know when and how.
For crying out loud, you're missing important plot points.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
But wouldn't it be better to do the opposite? I mean hell all we need is a few packs of smokes, a touch of this chemical, a touch of that chemical, and a pinch of high-dosage radiation and we can make our own cancer. It's unmaking cancer that is the trick no?
Hope is the currency of fools
There are multiple advantages of using cancer cells in research. Stem cells are generally hard to come by. Cancerous versions of the cells tend to be tougher and grow much more rapidly enabling cell cultures to be easily shared among scientists. Normal cells tend to stop growing after they reach a certain density and form only a thing layer on a Petri dish. Cancer cells exhibit no such inhibitions. The first mammalian cells that could be cultured indefinitely were the HeLa which were cancerous. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa I would imagine that these cancerous stem cells would greatly aid stem cell research.
And here I was worried it would never happen.
Why should I argue rationally with someone being irrational? I'll just mock them instead.
for this is actually to solve the problem of human death because cancer cells are for all intents and purposes, immune to death since they block the shortening of the telomere with in their own cell structures, I can't remember what it is called but supposedly the science behind this would be to look at applying this ability to ourselves to block the degradation of our own telomeres, thus preventing old age death.
Jonathanjk.com
Big Oil only wants you to think that they're not practical. I'm sure they have plenty of them locked up with their stash of electric cars and air engines.
Like polonium?
Depending on who you are, there may be benefits to expensive and difficult.
I wonder if this is hard to test for.
Oh, he meant actual fusion. I'm so much of a geek I thought he was making a reference to this fusion on the desktop, and I was going to say, look, there's alphas or betas available already, what are you getting so fussy about?
Judges and senates have been bought for gold; Esteem and love were never to be sold.
I thought with the HeLa cells we got all we need? Immortal cancer cells that spread and divide ad infinitum.
Is cancer some sort of infection? I thought it's a mutation gone wrong?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Infectious cancer is apparently possible, check out "devil facial tumour disease".
If someone is really intent on taking out a certain target (thus committing the resources), but even more intent on causing no collateral damage (unlike the Litvinenko hit), this method might make a bit of sense. Spend a lot of money, maybe you kill the guy or maybe you don't, but you don't harm anyone else either way. I can't think of any situations where this is less resource-intensive than assassination, but maybe Tom Clancy can.
Mailing Anthrax would take a very large box indeed.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
I read the original article and find the press release from MIT hypes the research too much.
The original article just indicates that different cells inside a tumor have different tumorigenic behavior. As mentioned above, getting cancer cells into culture and multiplying them is nothing new, it's what researches do every day since cancerous cells grow indefinitely and are therefore a very convenient tool for cellular studies of all sorts, not only cancer.
The authors don't even use the term "stem cell" in their article. I guess MIT just wanted to jazz it up a little bit by using buzz words.
So agroup of scientists have inserted some genes into a primary cell and created a cancer cell line????? The just reproved that cancer requires inititation AND promotion. Lame
Slashdotters are lazy. You need to link it for them, like so: Devil facial tumor disease