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Safe Stem Cells Produced From Adult Cells
hackingbear writes "Wired, citing a paper published in Science magazine, reports that Harvard scientists may have found a safer way of giving a flake of skin the biologically alchemical powers of embryonic stem cells by turning adult cells into versatile, embryonic-like cells without causing permanent damage. The technique involves 'adding cell-reprogramming genes to adenoviruses, a type of virus that infects cells without affecting their DNA.' Four-month trials on mice demonstrated that the resulting stem cells are free from unpredictable cancer-inducing mutations. This is definitely a breakthrough in stem cell research."
Additional coverage is available at Yahoo, and Science hosts the research paper, although you'll need a subscription to see more than the abstract.
Bullshit. We were right all along. Admit it.
Embryonic stem cell research was never needed, and has yielded no cures for anything.
What do you think of the Chinese practice of executing prisoners with a bullet to the head, so that no vital organs are damaged, allowing them to be transplanted to faithful Party hacks, or people willing to pony up the money for them? Would you be cool with the US government doing the same thing? After all, the guy's going to be killed anyway; It's RECYCLING!!!111eleventy
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SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
Normally I am almost always opposed to the "conservative" view point on just about everything, but I happen to agree with them on this; there is no need to use embryos for stem cells if we can make this work.
That said, I'm not sure I consider the surplus embryos that would just be thrown out anyway humans...at least, no more human than the developed, living, breathing people who get shafted by "conservative" policies in the main every day...
~Eien no Inori wo Sasagete~ Searching for my Hatsumi...
I look forward to being able to rely on that in the future.
You're planning on becoming an alcoholic and destroying your liver?!
Embryonic stem cell research was never needed, and has yielded no cures for anything.
Bullshit, you never knew what you were talking about and you still don't.
You same types were the ones saying there was no way the earth is round or revolved around the sun. When you're right, it's by accident. And even now it's too premature to say we don't need ESC research.
You're dead wrong that embryonic stem cells haven't done anything. Thousands of papers have been published using cultured embryonic stem cell lines. We've learned quite a bit from them already, and we definitely have gotten to the point we are at now with the induced pluripotent cells because of ES cell lines. The original papers last year WERE BASED off of knowledge gleaned from embryonic stem cells, that's how they knew which genes to use to deprogram adult cells. It certainly wasn't by reading the bible that they learned that. They used ES cells in those very publications to compare the IPS cells to to know they were working right.
Any cures which come out of IPS will be based in knowledge from ES cells. Anyone who truly believes that ES research is evil cannot in the future accept IPS treatment without being hypocritical.