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"Miraculous" Stem Cell Progress Reported In China
destinyland writes "In China's Guangdong Province there's been 'almost miraculous' progress in actually using stem cells to treat diseases such as brain injury, cerebral palsy, ataxia and other optic nerve damage, lower limb ischemia, autism, spinal muscular atrophy, and multiple sclerosis. One Chinese biotech company, Beike, is now building a 21,500 square foot stem cell storage facility and hiring professors from American universities such as Stanford. Two California families even flew their children to China for a cerebral palsy treatment that isn't available in the US. The founder of Beike is so enthusiastic, he says his company is exploring the concept of using stem cells to extend longevity beyond 120 years."
I'll believe it when I see it replicated.
China just beat us there. Regardless of your personal morals, you can't deny that we jumped on the brake, China didn't, and now we're sending them our professors.
You just got troll'd!
"Playing god" is vague & ill-defined. Talking about it that way abstracts the issue away from the actual concern of those who oppose destruction of embryos. Why not be specific?
Namely: It's about legalized organlegging. As treatments emerge, we'll find out whether they're willing to sacrifice other human beings for their own health & longevity.
Or, we'll find out whether or not they really believe embryos are human beings.
By definition, conservatives are always looking to the past for future solutions. While I'm sure the Republican party has a number of hypocrites, a significant portion believe the lives of the unborn are as important as the lives of the elderly. To them it is no different than killing one person to save another. The question that needs to be answered is when does human life begin? Another interesting point from this subject is China's draconian reproductive laws. One child per couple, especially in a country that is 60-70% rural, likely produces a huge number of stem cells. Would you rather the 75+ year old politicians pass laws like that to add another 20 years to life span? Are you that greedy to live longer that the government starts harvesting unused eggs and sperm to create stem cells? Can we as a nation handle people in the work force for another 20 years? What about cost of treatment? Will life extension be covered by universal health care?
Say what you will about the Chinese, but we could still learn a thing or two from them.
We've already got Fleischmann, Pons, and Taleyarkhan - what more do we need to learn about this kind of thing? Hu gives no numbers for success rates, and identifies FDA standards as a challenge. Anecdotes abound, and stats are lacking.
The article is propaganda. It starts by saying that the U.S. lost ground by Bush limiting embryonic stem cell research and then gives as an example a breakthrough in Japan using adult stem cells. If that is an example of the critical thinking applied by the author to the claims, I tend to believe that this whole operation is a scam.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
All cells do that. The thing you want to see happen is controlled differentiation. ie, cut out a diseased part of a liver, slap on a bunch of stem cells and have them convert to healthy new liver cells.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I have never heard of ANYONE who opposed adult stem cell research. You put up this straw man of "Right Wing Crazies" who don't understand the difference between embryonic and adult stem cells. As far as I can tell, the idea that there are "Right Wing Crazies" who oppose adult stem cell research is a fabrication of people who wish to marginalize all opponents to embryonic stem cell research rather than engage them in debate for the support of the general public.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
he says his company is exploring the concept of using stem cells to extend longevity beyond 120 years.
Maybe it's just me, but I believe that longer average lifespans are not a good idea at all.
It's just more mouths to feed, more people farting, shitting, throwing out trash... If we're planning on extending lifespans, we should at least implement better family planning across the globe, otherwise, we'd just be starving hell of a lot more people in the long run.
Miraculous and China in the same sentence. Until their results are duplicated I would regard this announcement with great skepticism.
How are we going to pay for an increasingly older population? Will they be older and healthy and still working, or older, on expensive medications, and requiring expensive procedures to keep them living?
(intellectual weakness: shouting "but the USA is worse" every time someone mentions any negative trait of any entity anywhere)
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
But the moral issue of potential organlegging is there. In India and China they are known for taking organs from death row inmates after execution and manufacturing the inmates' consent for such. Doctors trying to get more embryonic stem cells may convince or withhold treatments from those with the not-yet-waste fetus in order to turn a potential child into waste.
Wait until someone actually gets cured. This needs to show more than a placebo effect, and proof of cure from someone outside of the actors. The people who they claim to have cured may not have had anything wrong with them in the first place.
This sounds a lot like other snake-oil salesmen in the medical business. A lot of initial hype, and when results fail to appear they just quietly disappear again, taking their money with them. They do make a LOT of money on such scams, which is why they are so popular. $15,000USD per treatment would bring in a lot of money from desperate people.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
All comments till your post have been a poo-flinging contest between the democrats and republicans.
America needs a good shake up to awaken people from this dumb political fuckfest and get their focus back on technology and science.
In short, turn off the damn tv and pick up a book!
It was fun to watch this little game of telephone unfold:
eldavojohn: "Republican conservatives"
tcopeland: "conservatives" (dropped the 'Republican' part)
JeanPaulBob: "Bush" (converted 'conservatives' to 'Bush'. To be fair, Bush probably qualifies as a genuine conservative on this topic).
Gospodin: "prevented" (stuck with 'Bush', but changed gears from stuff that wasn't liked to stuff that was prevented).
Communication can be tricky sometimes.
But if I understand what you guys are saying, it was US policy for an army of bush elephants to trample anyone who spoke any 2 of the words "embryonic stem cell research" within five minutes of each other.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
That's not a matter of being "conceptually close" to destruction of embryos. One of the mechanisms of emergency contraception (and the Pill) is destruction of embryos--preventing implantation.
I bet you didn't realize that "destroying an embryo" isn't necessarily the same as "abortion", did you? By the technical medical definition, "abortion" is ending a pregnancy, and we mark the beginning of pregnancy at the moment of implantation. (And there are sensible medical reasons for these divisions--but those distinctions are only relevant in some contexts.) So if you prevent implantation, they call it "contraception", not abortion--even though the fertilized blastocyst is being killed.
(Note: By some definitions, "embryo" only applies after implantation. But by that definition, the debate isn't about "embryonic" stem cell research--it would be about "blastocystic" or "zygotic" stem cell research.)
In other words, this website is bordering on misinformation. Technically correct misinformation, but misleading information.
To my knowledge, that typically comes from a theological disapproval of birth control, unrelated to destruction of embryos. Most often from Catholics. It's about the question, "Should we be taking control of getting pregnant out of God's hands?" It's not about a "every sperm is sacred" idea.
It may be for some... Hmm, actually, I have no idea what the breakdown is.
Of course. It's the same question as, "Should we use the results of Nazi medical research?" It's a difficult ethical question. Once the harm has been done, can we use the "tainted fruits"?
>The truth is, Bush didn't ban stem cell research. Bush didn't even ban embryonic stem cell research.
>He only banned federal level funding for it. The States and the private sector were free to do as they pleased.
I'm so tired of this Bush apologizing.
The translation is, "He was a backward fuckwad pandering to religious nuts, but hey, at least his reach exceeded his grasp!"
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
And it's not even destruction of embryos that was prevented. It's federal funding of same.
This is an oft-used, idiotic talking point.
The insinuation is, that if some lab is doing stem cell research, the feds won't pay for the stem cell experiments. Yes, that is true.
They also won't pay for anything else that lab does. The lab will no longer get a federal grant for anything.
If there are any research institutions affiliated with the lab, the pox infects them too. If anyone in a laboratory affiliated with a teaching hospital or a major university -or any other research institution even partially dependent on federal grant money- goes near an embryonic stem cell, or even writes a paper detailing a meta-analysis of embryonic stem cell experiments done in other countries, the entire institution will have to shut down.
Anyway, so that's all over. In the meantime, we've been far surpassed on this front by countries with no government restrictions, and say, hundreds of millions of couples constantly conceiving their second, forbidden children.
Basically the "federal funding" thing was just an essentially meaningless qualifier to make it more lawfully palatable in order to aid it through the legislature. Think "medical" in "medical marijuana". :)
Because right now anecdotes are what we have. Stats are lacking due to significant long term results do not exist yet.
I actually have an uncle currently residing in China while undergoing Parkinson's treatment using adult stem cells. They made it clear to him that it was all theoretical, and no long term treatments had been observed. FDA standards are what forced him to go to China, though it is difficult to determine if they are helping or hurting the situation. While not allowing potentially dangerous treatments is indeed a noble thing, whether or not is helping is another matter. I believe for people with serious diseases (eg life threatening, or ones that pose severe functional considerations) having the option for such treatment is a good thing. After all if the disease is gonna kill you, what really is the harm from a treatment that is either gonna make it worse, or cure the disease.
I will go out on a limb and say that this story sounds to me like complete bullshit.
First tipoff: TFA doesn't list any citations to peer-reviewed articles. (I couldn't find any on PubMed.)
Second tipoff: Hu claims to have treated >5,087 patients for ataxia, autism, ALS, brain trauma, cerebral infarction, cerebral hemorrhage, cerebral palsy, diabetics, Guillain-Barre, encephalatropy, and spinal cord injury.
If he could have treated any one of those diseases successfully, any major medical journal would have been happy to publish his report, doctors from all over the world would be flying over to learn his techniques, and pharmaceutical companies would be offering him wheelbarrows full of money for the rights to use his techniques. And it would have been on the front page of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.
Third tipoff: The reporter who wrote this sounds like she doesn't understand the story at all. She doesn't ask one substantive question (like, "what peer reviewed journals have you published your work in?"). She sounds like she's asking generic questions from a list of standard interview questions her business editor gave her.
Fourth tipoff: The word "miraculous."
I'm not taking it seriously enough to look up the citations, but Science magazine had an article a while back investigating a Chinese doctor who claimed to be treating spinal cord injured patients, and it turned out that his patients weren't getting better and he hadn't published anything significant.
The WSJ had an article about a Chinese brain surgeon who was cutting a part of the brain to supposedly cure schizophrenia, depression, and a whole list of unrelated conditions, but he wasn't curing them, a lot of his patients were left with severe brain damage, families were paying him their life savings, he was making a fortune, American brain surgeons were shocked at his irresponsibility, and he performed several times more of these procedures than the rest of the world combined.
A friend of mine taught a course in science journalism in China a while back, and he was appalled to find out that Chinese journalists would just make stories up. They didn't understand the difference between telling a good story and telling the truth.
This is from the country whose pharmaceutical industry brought us contaminated heparin, contaminated milk, cough syrup that killed babies, and pet food that killed dogs.
To quote Thomas Paine, which is more likely: that a miracle could happen or that a man could lie?
It's not anti-Chinese to say this. In the U.S., the Chinese are some of the best scientists and science journalists.
China, for all its many virtues and accomplishments, is suffering from the results of Communism, the Great Cultural Revolution, and now unregulated free-market capitalism.
China is the same zoo of quack doctors and drug companies that the U.S. was in the days of Upton Sinclair, which led to the FDA. And we still have quacks here.
Cute, but mostly irrelevant to what I actually said: That every time we've tried to say "those humans aren't people", we've realized our mistake.
I'm curious about this--do you have references I can look into?
If only someone told that to your parents (your age + 1) years ago.
Perhaps it's based on the idea that all human beings should be protected the same way, regardless of size or level of development?
Why is "possessing neurons" the criterion? The capacity to feel pain? (So if we kill someone after applying anaesthesia or while they're asleep, is that OK?) You think that while we're still developing the capacity to think, our rights are still "developing"?
You want to classify human beings into "human beings that are persons" and "human beings that aren't". You want to say, "Unless you've finished developing this or that function in your body, you're not a human person yet."
I don't see why disagreement is "superstition".
You're assuming that an egg or sperm is "a human being".
I'm assuming there's no difference between "human being" and "human organism". And an egg or sperm is not a distinct organism. They are parts of an organism. When they combine, they form a new organism--and that organism only requires nourishment and a friendly environment, in order to develop into an adult.
See my earlier comment.
There has to be a point where we come into existence, yes. And we know that point, as I said above. You-the-human-organism came into existence at fertilization.
You want to add on a criterion for personhood, more than just being a human being. A level of development that qualifies human beings for this notion of "personhood". You think that you were once a human organism that wasn't a human person yet.
In that light, I think it's weird that pro-lifers are called "superstitious".