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Stem-Cell-Like Cells Produced From Skin
MikShapi writes "Skin cells can now be turned into something resembling stem cells. A genetic modification to four genes using a viral vector reverses differentiating, making the cells revert to a stem-cell state, capable for becoming any other cell in the body. The researchers are calling them 'iPS cells' or 'induced pluripotent stem cells.' In their experiments, iPS cells in the lab turned into nerve cells, heart muscle, and other tissues. The research was published in Cell and Nature by teams from the universities of Kyoto and Wisconsin. The article notes that if the new method proves successful, 'we can disconnect the whole stem cell debate from the culture war, from battles over embryo politics and abortion rights.' And, should this technique be adopted, stem cells will henceforth be abundant, easier and cheaper to come by for research and therapeutic purposes."
And of course this discovery can't go without political interference... the White House is already condemning the discovery, calling for a ban.
The world's only surviving livewriter.
Now all those people getting abortions in the name of science can finally stop.
include $sig;
1;
Farnsworth: As a man it has become too much of a chore for me to clean out my wrinkles each day. Is it true that stem cells may fight the aging process?
Geneworks Woman: Well yes, in the same way an infant may fight Muhammed Ali! But -
Farnsworth: One pound of stem cells please.
Quite frankly, up until this point, everything about stem cells was about ethics. That is what makes this story so humongous.
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
As long as the skin cells are not taken through a form that could be considered a viable human, I think this should end the ethical problems with stem cells nicely.
The issue people have with stem cell research is not stem cells per se, but that the harvesting of embryonic stem cells results in the destruction of a viable human.
Remember, religious people haven't had issues with adult stem cell research -- which this is. It's only embryonic stem cell research and SCNT processes which result in a viable human that people take ethical issues with.
If this can directly transform a skin cell into heart cells or whatever without moving through an "embryonic" state, then it's really the best of both worlds.
The real debate goes far deeper than merely how to create patient specific stem cells. The real issue is longevity and let's hope we're getting closer to where there's something worth arguing about.
You'd think everybody is in favor of longevity, but one of Bush's early science advisers made it clear that he was opposed to life extension in principle and Bush explicitly backed him up on that. It blew me away, but they clearly were making the case in favor of death. Personally, I was shocked at this and I brought it up with some people in my family and I was even more surprised to find that a lot of the older people were sympathetic to the idea that death was something that shouldn't be messed with.
Personally, I say fuck that. Ya'll can be my witnesses, I want to live as long as freakin' possible and if I end up lookin' like Frankenstein carrying my head in the jar in the crook of my sewn on arm then all the better. Sounds good to me.
Some of the arguments in favor of death are kinda lame. I've heard the economic argument over and over. This is a popular one. It's like the economy would get all screwed up if people stopped dying on seventy year clocks because all the old geezer's saving would just accumulate insane interests until the oldest people had all the money. Okay, I can see that but this is not a good reason for people to die. Money aint that big a deal if we all had indefinite life spans. I'm sure we could calmly negotiate something once everyone had matured a few hundred years.
Another pro-death argument is the idea of overpopulation. I think I have a sweet answer to this one and this is what I really wanted to post about. See, the key is that you've got to have an answer that appeals to a really silly level of religious symbolism and I think I got it.
What you do is, you say that anybody who wants to extend their life past a certain age and have children will have to voluntarily exile themselves into orbit or the moon or some other place off the surface of the earth. This is the perfect solution. Why? Because, the result is that the people who accept eternal life can only do so if they . . . wait for it. . . go to heaven.
Is that sweet or what?
As opposed to the other extreme, where science has no sense of morality and is only another function of the wants of the state. Like the Nazi's and Imperial Japanese in WWII experimenting on live humans. Such as testing biolgical warfare on them, the identical twin studies of Mengele, Japanese scientists dissecting Allied prisoners alive, and so on. Or the US for a scientific study letting blacks with syphilis go untreated for decades. And who knows what the USSR and the Chineses did/are doing. Science has to have some moral responsibility for its research and conclusions. The hard part is where to draw the line, and reasonable people can disagree on that.
I'd say that one of the main ethical issues is that it is unethical to tell people that a ban on federal funding for new embryonic stem cell lines would spare the destruction of those embryos when it only really means that those embryos would be destroyed as medical waste instead.
If you didn't come to party don't bother knocking on my door. Prince '1999'
And that is where we disagree. And I'm sure you can understand this line of thought even if you don't agree with it. It goes to the question of what is a human deserving of human rights. We consider it a unique being with DNA, post-fertilization.
We find this definition has a scientific and ethical clearity that can avoid a lot of the horrors of history that now (most of) humanity regrets based on what counts as a human worthy of protection.
We've found your previous and current standards of tribe/religion/family/ethnicity/sexuality/age/disability/ or simply 'might makes right' distinctions to be unworthy of our species.
So you disagree - so if we are not persuasive, are we at least not 'stupid?'
you don't get to claim this is some kind of victory
To quote Jerry Sienfeld's response when he was told he was not in listed in the top 10 of comedians in the history of America but was instead number twelve, I'll take it.
I can't even begin to understand how you could equate a couple of cells in a petree dish to a human.
At what age does a human/zygote make the cut so that it is no longer available for scientific research? Two months? Six months? Birth? Five years? When they are potty trained? What classifies a human as a human deserving human rights? What test must be passed before that clump of cells is human? Who are you to decide? What if the government decided the age of liberty was your age +1? How would that make you feel?
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Hardly. Frankly this is pretty interesting, and certainly would be useful for the getting stem cells for a person to grow a new body part. The question remains are these cells totopotent or pluripotent? Do they have the same range of use as ESC? Or just the range of ASC?
The answer is, we don't have an answer. We haven't done the leg work to find out what the range of use is on embryonic stem cells. This debate has nothing to do with ethics. No medical ethics are violated here, the debate is 100% about religion. The fact is, if one actually worried about the embryo, scientists would be happy to make lines by taking some cells from a developing embryo, then make a stem cell line out of those and implant the embryo and get an infant out of the deal. So rather than some embryo which would otherwise be medical waste, we would have a stem cell line and a child. Who could object? -- Um, religious folks; they still object.
It could very well be that ASCs are all we need and that we could dedifferentiate them easily with full usability, able to make everything from a new kidney to an embryo and a clone army. The problem however, is we just don't know because the research isn't there. The idea that a clump of 150 cells without any nerves at all is the ethical equivalent to a child, or that that clump of cells is more valued than somebody with a spinal cord injury whose treatments are being prolonged is a joke. A fly has 100,000 nerve cells and is by far the ethical superior of swaths of embryos.
Embryonic stem cells might not be any more useful. And we'll always have that "might" there until we do the research.
There's nothing about medical ethics which suggests some kind of soul thing jumps into a zygote at the moment the gametes join, and nothing to suggest that a couple cells aren't just that, some cells. If you read this story you must realize that there is no more ethics problems with ESCs then there is with scratching my ass. In fact, I'm bound to scratch away swaths more cells with the ass-scratch. Ethics? No. This is about religion and the unevidenced nonsense it advocates for no reason in particular. This research is useful, but it doesn't answer the actual questions we need answered.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
And then it diverts attention from all those acts by crating fake controversies, over imaginary "murders" of "living cells".
How *do* you define life then? It might be fine to just ban the abortion of a unborn fetus older than 2 months. There are tons of medical reasons to support that decision. But if you want to push the line even further, where does it stop? A ban on the morning after pill? A ban on condoms, since they interfere with "potential" life and thus "murder" it as well? A ban on masturbation perhaps, since it is also wasting potential "life"? How *do* you define life? What makes one kind of cell(fertilized egg) "alive" and yet other(sperm) is not, when neither is showing any greater sentience than the other at the early stages at least? If you make a criterion, what is the "rationale" behind that criterion?
And how soon before we get people being persecuted for masturbating, or using protection during sex? What is the guarantee that this lunacy will not lead to *THAT*? Historical evidence shows that when we put "government" in charge of personal decisions, and allow them too much power, *that* is when "experimentation on humans" happen. Care to give one example of a reasonably democratic country where human experimentation was tolerated? I can definitely give examples of fascist, police states, where the human experimentation happened and was ignored by citizens. And a government making insane, illogical laws that are just a step way for interfering with personal decisions of people, is more likely to lead to a fascist, police state.
And if "life" is so holy, what is the arrogant reasoning behind killing and eating other "near-sentient" lifeforms? By your logic everyone should be forced to become vegetarian? Oh wait! Even plants have been proven to be alive! So, it is the arrogant belief that only human beings are "truly" alive, right?
But that is a very Christian belief, isn't it? i.e. humans being the only "really" alive beings! As a matter of fact Jain and Buddhist religion consider even lower life forms to be just as alive and forbid killing them because of the desire avoid the very same arrogant hypocrisy. So basically the American Government is just enforcing a "Christian" belief, while paying lip service to the idea of being secular, "religious equality" and "separation of state and the church".