Slashdot Mirror
Stem Cells Restore Sight For Corneal Disease Patients
Sean0michael writes "Australian scientists have restored the sight of three human test subjects using stem cells cultured in contact lenses. All the patients were blind in only one eye. Two were legally blind, but can now read the big letters on an eye chart. The third could read the first few lines, but is now able to pass a driver's test. The University of New South Wales reports that these patients all had damaged corneas, and the stem cells came from each person's good eye. The best part: the procedure is inexpensive, raising hopes for being able to push this to the third world sooner than other, more expensive medications."
Which is to be expected. Controlling the differentiation of a cell is still not completely understood and difficult to do. It is easier with partially differentiated cells, and hence with stem cells from the tissue that we wish to regrow. Therefore, the first practical treatments and applications of stem cell research will be using adult stem cells.
Where embryonic stem cells come into play is by helping understand this differentiation process better. Increasing our knowledge will enable us to develop treatments that aren't possible using adult stem cells, but it will also likely contribute to having safer more effective adult stem cell treatments treatments. It may even shed some light into the entire aging process and cell life-cycle. They are very important things to be studying.
To put it succinctly, adult stem cells are currently at the R&D stage, embryonic at the pure science stage. Both are important.
In fact, I am not sure that there has been even one single break through that wasn't from adult stem cells.
Plenty of research is going on in embryonic stem cells, right now. Induced pluripotent stem cells were made using lessons learned from embryonic stem cells. That's a huge one right there. And the discovery of ESC itself was a significant advance.
You might not think of biology as being important beyond what diseases it can cure right now. /.ers tend to be annoyed by people who take this approach to computing. Hmm...
Ah, dude, he said breakthroughs, not research.
I already told you what the breakthrough was. They were able to successfully restore locomotion using embryonic stem cells in people with spinal cord injuries.
I also did a google search and didn't find much that was successful, though there are hundreds of breakthroughs using adult stem cells.
Which are all using as a base the work of those working on embryonic stem cells. Anyone who thinks that none of these breakthroughs were based off of any work done with embryonic stem cells is just plain ignorant.
OR maybe we think that the embryos shouldn't have been created in the first place.
Well then it's amazing that not a single one of the embryonic stem cell whiners have ever publicly stated this.
Only take what you need for the in vitro fertilization and no more.
But one doesn't know how many are going to be needed which is why they make and freeze so many. If you knew anything about how in-vitro fertilization works you'd know that there are usually a very small likelihood of successful implantation which is why they have to create so many.
Then you don't have an ethical dilemma about whether to kill them by throwing them in the garbage or kill them to experiment with ESCs.
There is nothing to kill. These are just clumps of undifferentiated cells.
ESC research could actually induce fertilization clinics to make MORE embryos than they need, knowing they'll be used for research as well.
And yet they don't need to since the fertilization clinics already had way more than they can use even before embryonic stem cell research started.
But it's nice of you to put words in the mouths of people like me to tear down to benefit your argument.
I didn't put in words into anyone's mouth. I was just describing the ultimate reality of what happens when the frozen embryos aren't allowed to be used for research. They are incinerated or simply thrown away.
You could call it a strawman.
Outlining the consequences of what happens when the embryos aren't allowed to be used isn't a strawman.
Congratulations on the insightful mod since that strawman was pretty tough to tear down.
You didn't tear anything down. You just basically repeated the wacko nonsense that comes from the religious right.
I guess you failed reading class as well: "The tests could begin by summer, said Dr. Thomas Okarma, president and CEO of the Geron Corporation." You can't restore locomotion in patients from a test that hasn't been done yet.
And you're a real idiot if you think that the base work in embryonic stem cells has led to anything other than cancer.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
No fetus has EVER been harmed in ANY stem cell test or experiment. In fact THEY CAN"T BE becasue they weren't fetuses yet. They're not even 200 cells. Hell, more cell dies last time you sneezed.
There have been many, many, many break thoughs from harvested stem cell.
Dumbass.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I'm not a fan of religion myself... but posts like this show a level of fanaticism that far outweighs the what average religious folks are willing to do in terms of "forcing ... belief down the throats of others".
This aside from the fact that you read an awful lot into his post. (Then again, reading his web site... I can kinda understand it ;)
abort: the act of terminating a project or procedure before it is completed
Who is twisting terminology here? It's typical that you went with "abort" rather than "abortion." Abortion of course, to most people, doesn't mean the act of stopping something.
The actual definition of "abortion" from your source
"# S: (n) abortion (termination of pregnancy)
# S: (n) miscarriage, abortion (failure of a plan) "
That first one is the one the anti-stem cell movement is hoping people will think of, since that's the one they're queasy about. But ESC doesn't involve pregnancy or the termination thereof. It's not a miscarriage. This isn't removing an embryo from a woman to kill it. These are embyros that were never on their way to being born, it doesn't even fall into your definition.
The hypocrisy here is so thick I can't help but think you're trolling.
It's still a human life...
I'm not arrogant enough to claim I know what constitutes human life, but I do believe it's more than just having a set of nucleotide instructions on how to make a human, which is all 5 day old embryos have.