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Skin Stem Cells Used to Mend Spines of Rats
The Toronto Star reports researchers have used adult skin stem cells to heal spinal cord injuries in rats. "Injured rats injected with skin-derived stem cells regained mobility and had better walking co-ordination, according to the study published yesterday in the Journal of Neuroscience. The skin-derived stem cells, injected directly into the injured rats' spinal cords, were able to survive in their new location and set off a flurry of activity, helping to heal the cavity in the cord."
no, but your penis will be able to walk again.
They're using their grammar skills there.
It has never been a better time to be a rat. no cancer or diabetes and now no paralasys.
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Indicating that we need an informed human volunteer program. We ask people to risk their lives at war in another country, surely taking some risks to help millions in your own country is not out of the question? I would think risky experiments would be limited to those who stand to benefit from them or terminally ill who want to end their life on a meaningful note.
This makes no sense to me. I remember a long time ago (maybe 1976) when I was a pre-med student in college, I got a part time job at the hospital's Anaesthesiology Lab. Some of the doctors were always doing research on lab rats, it was my job to assist them (mostly doing computer data analysis). One day I saw a doctor doing some particularly nasty stuff to some rats, I asked him what he was doing. He said he was severing their spinal cords. I asked him why he was doing that. He told me that rats have a unique ability to partially repair their spinal cord even if it was completely severed. Then he showed me how he did it (not that I really wanted to see it). He made a little slice, a little snip, and crudely sewed the rat back up. I asked him why he didn't put some antibiotics in the wound or anything. He said, "well they're just rats." Sheesh. That was about the time I decided I didn't want to be a doctor.
So anyway, I was under the impression that rats already had the ability to repair their spinal cord even without the use of stem cells. Perhaps I've mis-remembered what the doctor/researcher said, does anyone know the details?
This already happens for quite a few diseases. Look at Stem Cells Inc. and their work with Batten's Disease. These children are going to die if nothing is done so they are doing approved trial with them. The problem with using the people who are most ill is that sometimes they die before you get all the information you need from the trial. Trials are expensive and time consuming already so that's a pretty big negative to overcome.
Yes, but you would be a tiny part of a semi-formal, well-established, institutionalized breeding program. Your relatives would be your parents, siblings and cousins all at the same time due to inbreeding. You and your fellow rats would have been carefully designed genetically to custom physiological specifications so as to make experimenting easy and meaningful. Like for example, you would have no immune system so that foreign cells can be incubated inside your body without suffering tissue rejection issues. Or you would be genetically predisposed to some congenital disease so that drugs can be tested on you for effectiveness.
I say all this in jest, of course. It is important to realize that success with rats are accomplished only with the benefit of an incredible ammount of control excercised by researchers that translate very poorly to the realistic world human beings are living in. Beyond these initial animal trials, there are still an incredible number of hoops that medical researchers have to jump through before they can come up with something that is injectable into you.
Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.
Federal funding of adult stem cell research already exists. It's the embryonic stem cell research that is forbidden in the United States; and despite being legal in other countries, has yet to achieve even ONE useful cure. Where Adult Stem Cells, like in TFA, are now up to 20 or 30 miracle cures of a variety of injuries from heart attacks to severed spine paralysis. One ASC researcher has even claimed that he can regenerate 30,000 human brains from a single Grey matter stem cell (though, one would suspect that any knowledge the donor had would not be so duplicated- after all growing nervous tissue does not create the connections between those nerves).
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Can they make idiots re-grow brains?
technical writing / development
terminally ill who want to end their life on a meaningful note
They already do that. I had a friend who was diagnosed with a very nasty cancer that killed him in four months. Unfortunately his 'doctors' convinced him to allow them to test a drug on him. It helped him not a jot, a fact that they alluded to being likely (being of medical background I could read between the lines of what he was told), but never quite managed to explain clearly for him, and made him puke constantly. I did try to convince him to not take part, but they'd got him on the 'for the good of other people' thing. His was not the first case I encountered where this had occured, just the closest to me.
Terminally ill people make bad subjects. For one thing they're already dying, so your looking at a system in a failure condition, not much useful general data to be had there, and we are, after all, dealing with a person who may want to be doing other stuff in their last bit of time alive. They are also prone to being fragile of mind (not always, but it can happen in those who suddenly find they are dying young), so susceptible to being talked into things not in their best interests.
I'm against it, you may have gathered. Personally I think we should be growing brainless human bodies (as in never had a brain, never alive without external help), and test on them instead. Heck, we might even be able to cuts bits off them for people to use.
It's the embryonic stem cell research that is forbidden in the United States
One little difference from what you said. Embryonic stem cell research is not forbidden in the United States. The federal government just won't fund it except from a couple of pre-existing stem cell lines (which I guess are corrupted and worthless now anyway). Lot's of embryonic stem cell research happens via private funds and is often even funded through states like California.
Everything else you said is spot on.
www.joshferguson.org
At long last, Christopher Reeve will be able to walk again.
What's that you say? Ohhhh...
The only surefire protection against Microsoft infections is abstinence. - The Onion
Another interesting point -- George W. Bush is the only president ever to provide any funding for embryonic stem cell research. Ever. And yet he gets his ass kicked for not expanding the funding to cover more cell lines.
I am not left-handed, either!