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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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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...
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.
More money is currently spent on research into skin treatments, breast augmentation, and penile enlargement/enhancement treatments, than neurodegenerative disease (like alzheimer's) treatments.
In other words, in 20 years' time the world is going to be full of 80-year-old people with firm skin, perky tits, big throbbing erections, and absolutely no fucking memory of what to do with 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.
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.