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Stem Cells From Fat Create Beating Heart Cells
Amenacier writes "Melbourne scientists recently discovered that stem cells isolated from human fat could be made to turn into beating heart muscle cells when cultured with rat heart cells. This discovery may lead to the use of fat stem cells in repairing cardiac damage, or fixing such cardiac problems as holes in the heart. It is proposed that culturing the stem cells with rat heart cells allows them to differentiate into heart muscle through signals from the rat cells. In the future it may be possible to inject/transplant the stem cells into the damaged area and have them naturally differentiate into the type of cell required, with only the natural stimuli provided by surrounding cells, without any danger of rejection by the body. Quoting: 'The next step is to implant the human heart cells onto the damaged heart of a laboratory rat to see whether they repair the heart. Then they would be trialled in higher species such as sheep and pigs before human applications could be considered. Clinical application could be five years away ...'" The Age has a multimedia treatment (Flash) of the discovery.
Nah. We've already got those.
my fat cells are killing my heart cells
might as well sacrifice a few of them to give back what they took
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
That from the fat of the overweight American comes the cure for heart disease brought on by his poor diet!
With two thirds of Americans overweight, this is promising news.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Pabst Brewing co., is that you?
That McCain/Palin don't get elected if you want this kind of research to continue.
no matter who gets elected in the USA, future research won't be effected by this. Unless said president decides to attack Australia. Please do more research next time before making off-hand comments about politics.
Hey, I tried Pabst Blue Ribbon for the first time the other day, and it wasn't too bad. Everybody always talking about how bad it is, but they should just give it a try.
Beer, and this includes your favorite beer, is something you grow to like. In reality beer is nasty shit and we all know it. We just learn to tolerate a certain flavor, and we like to stick to what we learned to tolerate. Many may deny it, but in reality all we really want is the alcohol, or one to have the taste to remind us of the alcohol.
Yep, I just said that a beer didn't taste bad, and then went on to say that all beer tastes bad.
"Where have all the good people gone?" - Jack Johnson
So the plan was to get the entire world to bulk up and then sell their fat back to them as a means to save them...
the first rule of stem cell research is you don't talk about stem cell research.
The beauty of using adult stem cells is that they can be taken from and used on the same person without fear of rejection because they are already marked as "self" by the body...foetal stem cells may still cause problems because they have their own unique DNA.
Amenacier
There's a lot of questions that have to be answered here - it's not as simple as they say it is. Adipose-derived stem cells are definitely nothing new - adult stem cells are widely studied and commonly used in bioengineering labs. The problem is that translating this into a clinically useful tool is far from reality, and there are a lot of fundamental issues that have to be resolved before something useful can be made:
In Australia things might happen faster, but for the US, getting this particular system running is full of regulatory issues and problems that aren't going to be easily addressed - 5 years is frankly impossible. I'd say 10 years, and that's AFTER they get all of the animal studies up and running. Ah, and it will cost tens of millions of dollars, if not hundreds of millions.
One big advantage of using fat (or other adult) stem cells over fetal cells is that the cells could be harvested from the target patient, thus avoiding tissue rejection problems.
Just stop reading press releases and start reading books.
The reason you see these preliminary results everywhere is that there is a constant need of more good news to attract investors and sponsors.
When "research" includes such things as "discovering that other nations exist," we are well and truly fucked.
Well, I wouldn't know what Christians are saying. As far as I can tell, they're not saying anything about adult stem cells. They were opposed to embryonic stem cells because of how they were harvested, and it wasn't just Christians who were opposed.
By the way, mocking Christianity on Slashdot for easy upmods is too easy.
Eh? Was there a beating heart in The Cask of Amontillado? Maybe "the beating of his hideous heart" from The Tell-Tale Heart would have been more appropriate?
Doctor Who
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Even more so, since this is not embryonic stem-cell research (to which McCain, Palin, and many other Christians object), but rather adult stem-cell research (to which only Jehovah's Witnesses and Christian Scientists object, as far as I know).
Personally, I have yet to read of truly successful research with embryonic stem cells (because they are generally rejected by the recipient), whereas many large advances have been made with adult stem cells (since the donor and the recipient are the same person, rejection is eliminated) -- for men at least, pluripotent cells have been found in the testicles, so that any type of cell could be produced without having to use embryonic stem cells. I also recently saw a report about a person with congenital heart disease who was apparently cured by an injection of his own bone-marrow stem cells.
So I suppose my question would be why the intellectual elites want to spend their research monies on embryonic stem-cell research that is more expensive, less successful, and morally questionable to a large sector of society, rather than on research in areas where successes keep coming, the cells are available without moral complications, and the costs are in general lower. A cynical person might think that it's all about getting drug patents and getting money out of the consumers and padding their own checkbooks...
What do you mean? Step back as the opposite of step up to the plate?
here is a partial list of when they (have) work(ed) against progress
Christianity vs. Galileo & Copernicus
Fa Lung Gong vs. every frigging thing that is normal
Christian Science vs. modern medicine
Scientology vs. psychology
Islam (the fundamentalist variety) vs. gender equality and global harmony
But to be fair, religion *has* also stepped up to the plate on a few occasions. It is important to keep in mind that the concept of higher education and the modern collegiate system took shape within the catholic monasteries of the middle ages among the scribes whose efforts in propagating language and culture proved vital to later civil/social developments of the western world. And centuries before the crazy nut jobs took over Islam, it was Islamic scholars who preserved much of the writings of Plato, Aristotle and other treasures of Greek antiquity.
We play politics with this sort of thing a lot these days. But the actual stories behind the talking points are many shades of gray.
Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.
Clearly a humongous discovery. Should these cells be made to repair damaged heart muscle, it will revolutionize medicine. And without all the tedious hoo-hah about embryonic stem cells. Cardiac cells, like neurons, cannot be replaced by the body when damaged. This in fact is why many people die from heart failure years after surviving heart attacks. Heart attacks cut off the oxygen supply to cardiac cells, which die and can only be replaced by non-functional scar tissue, which is like the body's spakfiller. You lose enough cells, the heart cannot pump properly.
Yep, I just said that a beer didn't taste bad, and then went on to say that all beer tastes bad.
Ah. I guess that means you're drunk :-P
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Yep. We Americans have been looking for a new invention to sell the world. Well, it's fat. We have the biggest supply of fat of any country. Start-up the liposuction machines, and start exporting those fat-to-heart organ replacements.
FOX NEWS.com should be BANNED from television and internet. Have the Congress take it over and give us Truespeak.
I did saw "stem cells extracted from human farts..." had to re-read it a second time wondering where the science could ever stop
I'm not really offended, but it comes down for when life starts. Both Biblically and humanistically, I believe that we MUST value unborn life as a society, and not subject it to the whims of "the greater good," which rarely turns out as such. We consider human testing on anything other than volunteers as inhumane. If I consider the unborn as human, what other position am I supposed to take?
Liposuction + heart fix
Come out thinner and heart-healthy, all in one swell foop (without all that tedious dieting and exercise).
Someone is going to make a fortune.
Even Jehovah's Witnesses don't have an objection to banking and reusing their own personal blood. A lot of people are trying to make religious objections larger than they actually are in an effort to make religious people seem foolish or weird. Don't get taken in.
Actual christians (instead of the caricatures and straw men you see on slashdot and elsewhere) are rather happy about adult stem cell therapies and wholeheartedly support them.
The religious problem of Galileo was that he was saying that the Church must change the way it taught Scripture so that it conformed to heliocentrism. The Church, reasonably in my view, said that Galileo had to either say it was a theory, prove it was a fact, or shut his pie hole. Within a few short years, Galileo's works were in free circulation in Catholic Christendom using the formulation that heliocentrism was a theory. The last actual scientific objection to heliocentrism was laid to rest in the mid 1800s when stellar parallax was finally observed, centuries after Galileo claimed it as fact, instead of theory and got into trouble over it.
Galileo was an SOB and pissed off a great many early supporters. They *did* behave badly to him but that doesn't make Galileo right in his theology any more than Galileo's theory of comets was right. Eventually the Church admitted the personal revenge part of the affair, made a minor penance, and moved on.
So I suppose my question would be why the intellectual elites want to spend their research monies on embryonic stem-cell research that is more expensive, less successful, and morally questionable to a large sector of society, rather than on research in areas where successes keep coming, the cells are available without moral complications, and the costs are in general lower.
Well, human embryonic stem (HES) cells have already proven invaluable in research. Notably it was by studying them that we found out how to make induced pluripotent stem cells (IPS), basically how to make any cell into personalized embryonic stem cells without the embryo or the tissue rejection. That's not something you can say about adult stem cells: they won't ever be able to make new spinal cord cells. IPS cells can, and if we hadn't been researching HES cells, we never would have figured out how to make IPS cells.
And THAT'S why you don't ban different types of research: you don't always know where it's going.
You shouldn't attack the standpoint from an unrelated angle though. You might be missing the point, because I forgot to mention that the donors from whom any stem cells are created obviously don't care either.
Again, strictly speaking, coma patients are in a coma, and not brain dead, demented folk could quite possibly have life-preserving instinct. I won't argue the unconscious because, frankly, that's just ignorant.
I'm sorry, but genetics dictates that reproduction is a nearly boundless resource. Demented people and coma patients are not, nor is being demented or in a coma a part of living and reproducing.
If you want to argue for the rights of the unborn, stick to the unborn, or at least the reproductive cycle. A chance to lead a life != a life lead.
People with already established lives come first and always have.
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