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'Bionic' Nerve To Repair Damaged Limbs and Organs
University of Manchester researchers have transformed fat tissue stem cells into nerve cells -- and now plan to develop an artificial nerve that will bring damaged limbs and organs back to life. In a study published in October's Experimental Neurology, Dr Paul Kingham and his team at the UK Centre for Tissue Regeneration (UKCTR) isolated the stem cells from the fat tissue of adult animals and differentiated them into nerve cells to be used for repair and regeneration of injured nerves. They are now about to start a trial extracting stem cells from fat tissue of volunteer adult patients, in order to compare in the laboratory human and animal stem cells.
It's interesting to think that in Larry Niven's "Gil 'The Arm' Hamilton" stories (collected in Flatlander ) and other Known Space books organ transplants were supposed to be the rage, before eventually being supplanted by alloplasty, "gadgets instead of organs", long after. At the rate science is progressing, viable artificial solutions are going to be found for many things before transplantation would be possible.
What I wonder, though, is whether these artificial solutions will be allowed to be so much better than the original human part. If you have to replace someone's arm, why not do it with a space-age fiber that would allow him to lift hundreds of pounds single-handedly?
'Bionic' Nerve To Repair Damaged Limbs and Organs
Unfortunately, it costs 6 million dollars, and makes a very distinctive sound when in use.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Here's hoping this works for left palms and other parts of the human anatomy...
And with the progress in restoring sight...
Your spine would long give in if it is not muscled/solid enough to lift those hundreds of pound. Sure some people do lift as much , but they are trained for it, and as far as I know are not adverse to accident. Then also there is the center of gravity, unless you lift your 100's of pound like an those alter-lifting pros do, you could have serious problem when your gravity center is suddenly out of the body. Which naturally limit what you can take on, although the second one is probably a detail in comparison to the first one.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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I'd be interested to know if this would be helpful for people with ALS, where nerves slowly degenerate.
It might not be a cure to the fundamental problem, but might extend a life.
What about the possibility of enhanced limbs - not so much that they could LIFT hundreds of pounds but perhaps they were more dexterous? Able to move faster or with more precision? Wrists that could literally rotate 360 degrees? Sensors embedded in your fingers to detect certain things.
This is more entering the bionic range and is not really the topic of the article, which I have not read yet but once you open the flood gates to "new" ideas that are not organic in nature, you have a huge world of things to choose from. The downside may be that they are not all that great in the first place. There are millions of ways TO evolve. But not all of them are very good, as Spore should point out.
Other issues: interfacing with the body. A deer's antlers are great at this. Catheters are not. Infection is hard to keep at bay. Rejection / encapsulation. The body DOES NOT LIKE stuff inside it that it doesn't recognize. It will either encapsulate it or attack it. Either way, it causes irritation and could leach out into the body. Not something you really want to have happen.
Also, MRIs will be harder to take.
Another thing that people don't realize is that limbs, while not essential for life do support the body. Bones, aside from producing red blood cells, also excrete hormones, as we are also learning about adipose (fat) tissue as well. So just because a human limb may appear inferior at first glance, we still have a ways to go before we are actually able to replace human limbs with something truly superior.
have transformed fat tissue stem cells into nerve cells ... thereby turning fat people into really smart people.
I guess it would be pretty simple to have someone doing liposuction sign away their rights to the fat. One persons waste is another persons gold mine. Doctor: "Do you want to bring home the fat in a kitty bag?" Patient: "No, why would I want to do that?" Doctor: "Well I guess you won't mind terribly much then if we use some of the fat for stem cell research and making soap?"
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
I still think the priority should lie with curing the three PMS's: pre-, present-, and post-. Where is that seedless watermelon guy, what is he working on nowadays?
Something that's always intrigued me about stem cell research is the concept of genetic memory. Considering the implications that this theory has on the theory of evolution, I wonder if mixing and matching stem cells, and thereby mixing genetic memories, would fuck the evolutionary process. It's the type of result that we probably wouldn't see for thousands (or tens of thousands) of years.
Eventually though, I would imagine that it would be like the episode of Star Trek Enterprise when they find the race of people who are basically falling apart genetically and they have no idea why.
And then of course the old addage "Overspecialize and you breed in weakness" has many powerful implications in this as well.
Maybe I wouldn't be so scared if we weren't still completely reversing our dietary ideals every 3 years. If we can't even nail down a healthy diet (pyramid points up or down now?!), how the hell can we figure out what the ramifications of stem cell research would be on our evolutionary process?
Free liposuction, awesome!
One would assume at that point they could just give you an artificial spine, which could support 100's of pounds.
The paralympics would become a lot more popular.
I can't believe these people have the nerve to do such a thing!
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
Would be awesome to have some heat/cold sensors to be able to somehow "detect" if something is too hot or cold!
Maybe some sort of "tactile feedback" mechanism as well so you could feel some kind of "force" if you for example come into contact with a physical object.
c++;
> Would be awesome to have some heat/cold sensors to be able to somehow "detect" if something is too hot or cold!
You already have those, they're called 'fingertips'.
What a depressingly stupid machine.
It would also be awesome to have a device for people to detect if someone is trying to make a joke on slashdot.
Maybe you could browse in 'humour impaired' mode (or just 'really really tired' mode), where jokes could by highlighted for users benefit...
If only they could come up with a Bionic Scriptwriter and Bionic Actress With Personality to save the god-awful Bionic Woman series....
Had some high hopes for that one... what a waste.
It seems all the successful new treatments with stem cells that we keep hearing about use the adult type, which also have the great advantage of not causing rejection. It makes me wonder why there is so much pressure to use embryonic stem cells, when the research with the adult type is so promising and is far from being exhausted. Perhaps it is because the adult cells, being collected from the patient him/herself, don't need to be bought, so there is no profit incentive, while embryonic stem cells hold the promise of a very lucrative new pharmaceutical/medical market?
there
I fully agree - if I ever find one, I'll mail it to ya :-)
What a depressingly stupid machine.
There's nothing bionic about it. They are using a man-made tube to help a real nerve grow from stem cells. There's no electronics, not even any moving parts. It doesn't augment or affect the nerve in any artificial way. The end result is... A normal nerve.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
For MS (not the operating system). Because of the nerve damage that occurs in the patients. We still need to find a way to stop further attacks without daily/weekly/monthly injections but there is talk of a pill. This is really exciting! To go from near daily injections will no promise that it will stop the progression to the prospect of a daily pill that really does stop it. I for one welcome this research.
Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
It's an old and tired joke, but because it promises to "bring damaged limbs and organs back to life", it's the best post I've seen to use it with:
I, for one, welcome our new reanimated zombie overlords.
I'd put up with it if my MS was alleviated. (And don't worry too much about the cost, I'll find a way to pay for it. [I'll be able to work. {Insert rant about insurance companies that will let you die before they pay and gu'mint agencies that won't help you until you're destitute from having to sell off EVERYTHING, (your house, your car, your furniture, your jewelry, your computers, your retirement savings, your grave [I'm not fuckin' kidding!]) ... right here.}])
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I do some weightlifting and read up on this very topic some years ago (so take this info with a grain of salt). As far as i can remember the dorsal spine can take about 700kg and the ventral about 500kg. if you do squats or deadlifts it is very important to stress only the dorsal part of the spine, no hunching. here is a good link about squats: hhttp://www.exrx.net/Kinesiology/Squats.html , it's pretty hard to get the technique right.
Yet another promising therapy derived from adult, not embryonic, stem cells.
the ones that became bugs weren't humans to start with..
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
You get 50% of the soap.
Three snipers have you in their scopes. Put the parentheses down before someone gets hurt.
Each parenthesized section can be knocked out without affecting the overall sentence structure (but each segment augments the previous one and nothing else.)
:-)
As a lover of Formal Languages and Automata, I THINK this way.
Scary isn't it?
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Whoever tagged this article "forbiddenbybush" is what politicians refer to as a "useful idiot". In this case the "idiot" is "Useful" to Democrats because they think that Bush banned all stem cell research and therefore they must vote for a Democrat so this vital research can continue. This is WRONG! Bush banned using the embryos and zygottes from unborn and now dead(usually aborted) babies to harvest stem cells. He did not ban any kind of stem cell research itself. It should be noted that while this may actually hamper embryotic stem cell research, Adult stem cell research has been shown to be much more promising as this article points out. In the future people will be able to lose some fat and get stem cell therapy all in one shot.
Oh..
Wait.
Never mind
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Finally testing on humans. It's about time we got some results instead of the mice getting all the 'love'.
~Vexed and loving it!
Seriously! It's not like they don't have ten years of Ghost in the Shell to rip off to make some decent scripts from. Lord knows they don't have the physics of high powered impacts down any better than in the seventies. If girl kicks guy in the chest with enough impact to send him across the room then it was hard enough and a small enough diameter surface to go through his chest. That pretty much goes with every hit she makes. Hit somebody in the face at full strength? The jaw would leave on vacation to the other side of the room or turn to powder at the impact site. That's one of the things that made the woman from Ghost in the Shell so interesting. She had to learn how to dial back what she could do not go all girl power over the scary foul talking black man.
> It doesn't take much effort to pump their study animals (be they sentient or not) full of immunosuppressant drugs, so the researchers can test the boundaries of science.
Yeah, that's great for the lab rats and all, but what about actual patients? Suppress their immune system badly enough and they get to live in a sterile plastic bubble.
> Everything they can now try with this *still limited* stem-cell, they could have been doing years ago with embryonic-stem-cells.
Except, you know, actually *solving* the rejection issue (not treating it with immunosuppressant drugs, which are terrible for your health). You know, that crazy little thing that keeps the great advances from being very useful to actual patients (even if it doesn't matter as much on research grant applications, or on test animals you can afford to destroy afterwards).
No, they're called 'thermometers', which give you visual feedback when you see how high the red line is.
Some people have had biocompatible magnets implanted in their fingertips. The magnet responds to electric fields, and you can 'feel' them as the magnet wiggles against nerves that sense pressure.
http://www.engadget.com/2005/05/05/magnetic-implant-gives-body-modder-a-sixth-sense/