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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.
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.
How about you RTFA:
"SH: Osiris in the U.S. is our biggest competitor. We are way ahead of most of the Chinese stem cell companies."
Also from reading the article, they don't seem to be doing anything terribly scientific. They are basically injecting stem cells into patients, along with "holistic" treatment like accupuncture. And the head guy seems like more of a business-guy than an actual researcher. So this all smells like a lot of BS to me.
Limiting funding for embryonic stem cells did slow research into adult stem cells. Specifically, it slowed research into just what is and isn't possible to treat with stem cells. Adult stem cells don't function exactly as embryonic stem cells do, generally embryonic stem cells are capable of becoming any tissue in the body where as adult stem cells are limited to a subset of them.
For every tissue, it is probably possible to produce an adult stem cell that will be capable of becoming that tissue but it costs time, money, and equipment to create it. That same time and effort could have gone directly to working on and testing the treatment. So, yes you are correct that adult stem cells can probably be used to cure the same diseases embryonic stem cells can. But you are also wrong if you insist that the lack of embryonic stem cell funding didn't slow that research down, leading to thousands of untimely deaths.
That's not a judgement on the ethics of the situation, I'm just trying to lay out the facts as I see them.
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"?
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". :)
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.