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.

Comments

Almost there!

[GrapeSteinbeck]

Now we just need to to infect the top seven world leaders with it and we'll have a cure. (MAD TV reference)

Scientists are the real moral crusaders

[HumanSockPuppet]

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).