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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."
They have lead in them...
The musings of just another geek and his junk.
I'll believe it when I see it replicated.
> Republican conservatives move to block stem cell research
It's embryonic stem cell research that conservatives don't like. Adult stem cell research is fine.
The Army reading list
If true, this might, trigger a reaction in USA, like the launch of Sputnik by USSR did back in 1957. Suddenly science will be "in" again and it will shake America from its lethargy, self absorption and provide some kind of common unifying goals.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
"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.
Unless I misread the article. It seems they found a way to make Adult Stem Cells behave like embryonic stem cells.
The moral issue of Stem Cells isn't the Stem Cells but the fact that if you needed Embryonic Stem Cells you needed to Abort/Terminate/Kill/(whatever verb you think best describes the process) the fetus.
As the anti-abortion groups see abortions as killing a human life, it makes it a situation where you kill one human life to save an other or many, which is a huge ethical dilemma.
Now if you can make adult Stem Cells work like Embryonic then the issue to the ethics is reduced, taking most major religions out of the fight. Only leaving a few Right Wing Crazies who will not even try to understand the difference.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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?
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
Props to the submitter.
By the way, if this is even one-tenth as good as it looks in the article, it'll be awesome. For example, from the article:
One example is the recovery of a nearly blind sixteen-year-old girl, Macie Morse, who recently got her learnerâ(TM)s permit and started driving.
She came to one of our hospitals for treatment in July 2006, with 20/4,000 vision in one eye and only light perception in the other due to optic nerve hypoplasia.
After treatment, Macie now has 20/80 vision in one eye and 20/400-plus in the other!
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.
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.
I guess it's going to be a true test of ideals as Republican conservatives move to block stem cell research ... as they approach age 75.
With this development in China, suddenly playing god might not sound so bad.
From TFA:
As of February 2009, Beike has treated over 5,087 patients with cord blood stem cell injections for diseases like ataxia, autism, ALS, brain trauma, cerebral infarction, cerebral hemorrhage, cerebral palsy, diabetics, Guillain-Barre, encephalatropy, and spinal cord injury â" many of these are considered incurable diseases.
Cord blood stem cells was NOT under any restrictions from the previous administration. For that matter, the Bush administration was the first US administration to fund this type of stem cell research.
I understand your desire to blame everything on Republicans, but you should really try to give credit where credit is due and stop making stuff up to make them look bad.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
I guess it's going to be a true test of ideals as Republican conservatives move to block stem cell research ... as they approach age 75.
This is why there will probably be genuine life extension, because the elderly and soon-to-be elderly in our society control so many resources.
Once there is an upsurge in life extension, this should be followed by an upsurge in curing cancer. Why? Because if you extend the lifespan of a mammal long enough, it's going to die of cancer.
http://www.sens.org/
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/aubrey_de_grey_says_we_can_avoid_aging.html
It's not even embryonic stem cell research. It's destruction of embryos. Meaning:
1.) Bush's policy was to fund ESCR from already-existing lines.
2.) There are various attempts to derive ESC lines that don't require destruction of embryos.
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!
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.
As I stated earlier, this research was from cord blood stem cells, not embryonic stem cells. The federal government under GWBush funded this type of research and only banned funding from embryonic stem cells coming from new lines.
I believe that China's success in this field may be the result of much less oversight and fewer regulations. We don't know how many "patients" died or were mutilated in the process of supposedly perfecting this treatment. That sort of thing wouldn't fly in the US.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
And the article seems to indicate that the treatment was done with adult stem cells.
Dr. Hu - "In 2004, after three years of clinical studies observing more than 100 cases, I decided to build a company to supply and work on safe adult stem cells."
Dr. Hu - "As of February 2009, Beike has treated over 5,087 patients with cord blood stem cell injections"
Dr. Hu - "After all these years of observation and practice, I consider adult stem cell-based therapy to be safe."
Dr. Hu - "We will set the standard and criteria for R&D in developing adult stem cells and iPS."
Dr. Hu - "The adult stem cells we use are safe."
Dr. Hu's only mention of embryonic stem cells is the following....
Dr. Hu - "I think Geron's FDA clearance to begin the world's first human clinical trial of embryonic stem cell-based therapy is great news for the entire stem cell industry. More competition is inevitable."
The significance here is that China doesn't have the same restrictions regarding human testing that the US does. They've jumped into it faster, and Dr. Hu has been using adult stem cells rather than embryonic. According to this article, the only negative side effect to having an embryonic stem cell ban is that it reduces competition.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
I know very little of medicine and biology but how do stem cells treatments work? I imagine stem cells being used to treat patients don't come from the patients themselves right? If so, wouldn't the body reject it? And what stops stem cells from becoming tumors? From TFA, "An article in last week's PLoS Medicine describes a teenage boy's brain tumor after receiving a fetal stem cell treatment in Russia." Basically, in theory and in simple terms, how are stem cell treatments suppose to work?
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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.
Now if only we could prevent access to those people, the problem would work itself out in a few decades!
You know, the same way we should prevent Creationists from getting flu shots.
With this development in China, suddenly playing god might not sound so bad.
Actually, immortality has always been a big deal in Chinese mythology and history. Many real life Chinese Emperors tried everything from drinking mercury to sending out massive expeditions searching for mythical islands or legendary items in hopes to live forever.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
It always is, any time you hear about Stem Cells cured x, y, z. It was adult SC.
The fist treatment that actually uses embryonic SC is scheduled later this year.
I really wish people would stop acting like we are so far behind because of Bush he only stopped research on embryonic not adult.
I believe that China's success in this field may be the result of much less oversight and fewer regulations.
Or maybe less scrutiny/peer-review on their results? Untying a researcher's hands and letting them do whatever they want could let them advance more quickly (I'd cite a couple of counter-examples, but I don't want to Godwin the thread). But, I suspect that what we're seeing isn't a huge banner showing success due to Chinese freedom, but a big PR campaign. As soon as Chinese doctors start hiring on at the Mayo Clinic to fix people using these techniques, I'll apologize for my skepticism.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
And it's not even destruction of embryos that was prevented. It's federal funding of same. This has to be one of the least understood and most poorly reported issues of the entire Bush administration.
...following the principles of Heisenburger's Uncertain Cat...
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?
Actually he didn't even do that (stopped research), he only stopped *federal funding* on new lines of ESC.
(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!
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.
As I stated earlier, this research was from cord blood stem cells, not embryonic stem cells. The federal government under GWBush funded this type of research and only banned funding from embryonic stem cells coming from new lines.
You know that, and I know that, and you can say this until you're blue in the face, but the hard core Bush bashers probably aren't going to listen. They'll still believe and repeat the lie that Bush "banned" all "stem cell research" to the day they die, just as a good many of them actually believe Sarah Palin really said "I can see Russia from my house" - when in fact it was comedian Tina Fey who said that in a skit on SNL.
Vitriol flows better when truth doesn't get in it's way.
I'm not even a "pro-life" conservative, for that matter; I'm just sick and tired of hearing this disinformation repeated ad nasueum.
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.
Further, he didn't even ban federal funding for research on existing lines of embryonic stem cells, only on new lines.
And all other forms of stem cell research, and their funding (cord, adult) were not restricted whatsoever.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
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.
... to ADULT Stem Cell Research (ASCR?) so all these collective panties won't get bunched up every time a new research report or story comes out? That'd be nice. Thanks.
~AA
I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Namely: It's about legalized organlegging [wikipedia.org]. As treatments emerge, we'll find out whether they're willing to sacrifice other human beings for their own health & longevity.
Let's be clear on three things:
1. You get ESC from 5 day old blastocysts. Not embryos from pregnant women. These embryos have to come from in vitro fertilization, by the time you can tell you're pregnant, even with a blood test, you can't extract ESC from that embryo: they've already turned used up their ESC. This will not lead to abortions, because if you know you have an embryo, it's useless as far as ESC goes.
2. ESC lines have been established. You won't need to destroy an embryo each time you need ESC, just use from the existing lines.
3. Induced pluripotent stem cells and adult stem cells will probably make the debate over ESC much ado about nothing as far as treatments go, but ESC have been invaluable to research already.
So... no, fortunately I think we will be able to leave this annoying debate unresolved.
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"?
On a side note, Palin did actually say she could see Russia from Alaska and that it helped her foreign policy experience. It just didn't get mocked verbatim by SNL. I can understand why there would be the confusion since so often SNL had no need to tweak what she said to make fun of it.
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'm pretty sure the poster mean when the experimental results are replicated independently by another lab.
Also, stem cells replicate relatively infrequently. Replication results in minor DNA damage, so the body keeps the source of new cells in as pristine a condition as possible by minimizing stem cell replication. One of the two new cells chills out until needed again while the other replicates as many time as is necessary.
That's actually one of the major concerns for adult stem cells. Taking cells from an adult, which has already endured a lifetime of genetic damage, and using them for a stem cell line is begging for some cancers to pop up. All the nastiest cancers known to man originate from stem cells. Fetal stem cells have the benefit of being the most pristine stem cells you can get.
Ironically enough you are the exact type of narrow-minded individual referred to by the parent!
An inventor is a man who asks 'Why?' of the universe and lets nothing stand between the answer and his mind.
The human race has a poor history of deciding who of us are "people".
Well said. By the way, my cat is now a person - she has been denied personhood for too long now!
The truth is, she wants to marry her same-sex life partner, an unemplanted embryo named Zoe. They make a lovely couple. When Zoe grows up, she wants to eat solid foods and have brain activity (and extremities!). She's quite precocious, we're all so proud.
"All these years believing you're the signified monkey, only to find out you're just a big hunk of nobody cares."
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.
Europeans did it too. Isaac Newton being one of the more prominent.
Oh god, that woman is John Romero!
There multiple mechanisms emergency contraceptives/the Pill. (The two are the same drug.)
1.) Prevent the release of the egg.
2.) Make it more difficult for sperm to reach the egg.
3.) Affect the endometrial wall, making it more difficult for the blastocyst to implant.
The third one can only happen if the first two fail, so it's not the primary mechanism, but that's where the concern is with emergency contraceptives. (Note: There's also some controversy over the significance of the third mechanism.)
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.
It's destruction of embryos.
While technically true, the term "embryo" can be misleading: it could lead some to think that the thing being destroyed is something close to a fetus---i.e., something with a central nervous system and a beating heart. But typically, "Embryonic stem cell research" only involves the destruction of a blastocyst. We're talking about a tiny cluster of cells that has *no neurons*. (If left to grow into a late-stage embryo then some of the cells in a blastocyst will have been the *distant ancestors* of the first neurons.)
And the anti-ESCR crowd objects to said destruction because...well it's not clear. I gather that some of them think a "soul" is injected into a zygote at the moment of its formation. (Of course, the meaning of that sentence hinges on what you think a "soul" is, and I rarely get a satisfactory definition out of religious types.)
But if there is such a thing as a human soul---loosely defined here as the mind of a person---then findings in neuroscience seem to suggest that a human soul is something generated by a human brain. In that case a common housefly would have greater capacity to bear a soul than a blastocyst, because at least a housefly has a brain!
So while I recognize that the anti-ESCR crowd has some deep emotional feelings about this, I also feel that the respect paid to them by policy-makers was not earned legitimately. How could it have been? The foundation of their argument is superstition.
I'm curious about this--do you have references I can look into?
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".
'go forth and multiply' is simply religious speak for 'propagate the species' and 'survival', both of which are fairly standard concept in population biology. I agree with the GP that there is an overpopulation problem as it is; but be careful about conflating it with religious speak. The bible simply expresses in words the biological drive that humans experience every day. Religious wack-jobs aren't responsible for overpopulation because they follow 'go forth and multiply', nor is the religion itself. Overpopulation is just overpopulation. No need to blame the religions for it, or the people following said religions.
>To ridicule those that value religion, you are rejecting that which
>preventss them from forcing you into their "hocus pocus sham".
Crock. Of. Shit. Freedom OF religion also means freedom FROM religion. The Bill of Rights does not enshrine religion, it neuters it, and rightfully so.
Yes, you have the right to worship whatever you like. Of course I also have the right to point out it's all fairy tales and magic worship.
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.