Slashdot Mirror
Neurons Created Directly From Skin Cells
alx5000 writes "The Times is running a story about a neurologic breakthrough that could revolutionise treatments for conditions such as Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's: Neurons have been created directly from skin cells for the first time. Quoting neurobiologist Professor Jack Price: 'This suggests that there are no great rules — you can reprogramme anything into anything else.' The article also points out that this method could work around the ethical issues surrounding embryonic stem-cell research."
I'm happy for those with MS & Macular Degeneration...
There is Hope!
(Just not the "Obama" kind of hope...)
I'm curious...
Is this possibly a cure for Alzheimers, as well?
Holy happy hippy crap!
It all depends on where they get the skin, and from whom.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Neurons have been created directly from skin cells for the first time.
This research counters all the arguments that people shouldn't do drugs because they kill brain cells. Now that we know how to create new brain cells, there is no excuse for not being stoned. And bike riders can now throw away there helmets. Science brings freedom back to democracy.
...until this technology can be used to regrow luscious locks of hair for balding people? Just asking... for a friend... .
So that's why they cut of the foreskin.
Actually, yes. The foreskin contains about 90% of the nerve endings on the penis. It's rather barbaric that this country is one of the few in the western world that routinely mutilates male anatomy -- many parents often not even knowing why it's done, only that everybody else does it. more info. For the very few men that have been circumsized as an adult and had an opportunity to experience sex both ways -- they say that sex is very disappointing after. Some become suicidally depressed.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Sick people don't have money because they spend it all on hospitals and medicine but horny old fat people have tons of money. If Dr. Jack wants some serious grant money he'd better try to turn fat cells in boner cells. He can use some of that cash to help him make Michael J. Fox less shaky and hell, why not give him a giant wang while he's at it.
He'd be great in a commercial, "Hi, I'm Michael J. Fox. You may have noticed that I'm a lot less shaky these days and I also have a giant wang now. I owe it all to Dr. Jack." Boom! Instant Nobel Prize.
If you didn't come to party don't bother knocking on my door. Prince '1999'
There are no "workarounds" in the need for embryonic stem cells. Each approach and method of stem cell generation have their respective strengths and weaknesses
Fine, fine, I accept the mod. I still say eating babies is funny, but there's no excuse for misspelling "smartest". That's just dum.
If you never do research with fetal stem cells, you'll never know what they can do. When the alternative to fetal stem cell research is throwing the fetal stem cells in an incinerator, don't we have a moral obligation to get the best use out of them that we can?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
...but your brain?
This is more a religious issue rather than ethical - much like the pro-choice and anti-choice debate. Same people are anti-stem cell as those who are anti-choice.
Don't get carried away and be all rash now.
Some drugs actually promote neurogenesis. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1253627/
You wouldn't want to get stoned all the time and then have this new cell therapy and end up with too many neurons.
Actually, yes. The foreskin contains about 90% of the nerve endings on the penis. It's rather barbaric that this country is one of the few in the western world that routinely mutilates male anatomy -- many parents often not even knowing why it's done, only that everybody else does it. more info.
Read, please. "Barbaric" and "mutilate" are highly emotionally charged words. I'm a father. I've got two sons. I was circ'ed as an infant, as were both of my boys. I asked all the questions -- is it necessary, is it recommended, why or why not, etc. I decided to go ahead, and I know exactly why I made that choice based on scientific data. If someone else is informed of the scientific data and chooses against circumcision, I fully respect that and have no problem with it. I can tell you that the child displayed little evidence of pain, as I was right there with the doc as it was done, and it heals quite quickly. And no, not "everybody else" does it. The number of uncircumsized males in the US is increasing, actually. You might find the numbers surprising if you have time to look it up.
For the very few men that have been circumsized as an adult and had an opportunity to experience sex both ways -- they say that sex is very disappointing after. Some become suicidally depressed.
Which, by your admission, is a tremendously small number of the male population. And if you become suicidally depressed because you're having disappointing intercourse, I'm guessing it's not just about the intercourse.
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
For those of you trying to find the actual nature article, here. I know we hate paywalls, but it should really be required for submission to slashdot that a link to the real paper, not preview, be included.
I am not a stem cell biologist, nor am I a neurobiologist, and I will need to read the paper more carefully when I’m at home, but some of my thoughts:
There do seem to be some hurdles to using this in humans, but many are trivial in comparison, and the reason the authors didn’t do them yet is because they wanted to get this out there before anyone else did. For one thing, they haven’t shown this in humans yet, but it should work in human cells that’s their stated next step. These cells were grown using dead mouse “feeder cells” which is common in cell culture, but complicates things for human therapy. You don’t want even dead mouse cells or other people’s dead cells in something that is going to go into your brain. People are working on culturing without feeder cells, I’m not sure where they are on that. The method of getting the 3 genes in is also an issue. These guys used lentiviral transfection, which is not something you want for human cells. Earlier work on IPSC got it done by incubating cells with transcription factor –protein- modified to penetrate cells. That might be a good next step here, though it would probably decrease the efficiency.
A bigger issue to me is what they are transfecting. They’re putting in three transcription factors, Ascl1, Brn2 (also called Pou3f2) and Myt1l. One of them, Ascl1, is found in many cancers (according to wiki anyway) and might be tumorgenic. Especially if they find they can’t get it to work without viral transfection, that could be a concern. The other two though aren’t tumorgenic apparently. Brn2 (also called Pou3f2) and Myt1l are both associated with neuron differentiation, which is interesting.
They did overcome a big hurdle: these are not pluripotent, which probably means there’s less chance of causing tumors, teratomas. With induced pluripotent cells, that is a concern. If you were to inject IpsC into your brain, you don’t know what you’re going to get. You could get bone cells growing in there, cells which aren’t supposed to be there that could potentially cause tumor formation. This doesn’t seem like that will be an issue here, they apparently get all neurons, neurons which appear not to continue dividing. I do find it a little hard to believe though that these only produce neurons and never glial cells, though I’ll need to reread it a few more times.
This is also a interesting paradigm shift for developmental biologists: apparently you don’t have to go back to square one to switch cell fates, it will take longer and be less efficient to do so. IpsC take about a month to become pluripotent and then be grown back into neurons, and only about 1% of the cells do that if I recall correctly. These take a week.
For much of the study, they seem to be using 5 different factors, not the 3 minimal ones. They state that Ascl1 alone was sufficient to make these cells start looking like neurons, but the other two were needed for them to look and behave like mature neurons. Most of the figures were working with a combination of 5 factors. With all 5, they showed a good mix of different types of neurons, but that had less efficient conversion than the minimal 3. I’m wondering if you’d actually be able to get all the different types of mature neurons with just the 3. I’d guess it’s not that they intentionally did it that way, but they wanted to hurry up and publish ASAP, so they skipped doing that characterization for now.
One problem facing all these therapies eventually, as I understand it, is that you want to get one specific type of neuron for therapy. I have no idea what strategies there are to direct differentiation into specific types of neurons, but this seems like it would be the bigger hurdle.
Why not let your sons decide if they want to be circumcised? Why force what is essentially either plastic surgery or an amputation onto an infant?
I am a firm believer in personal freedom. If adults want to be circumcised, I see no reasons they shouldn't be allowed to be, whether they are male or female. But doing it to an infant ... that's a line I'm very much against.
I'm a mother. I've got two daughters. I was circ'ed as a girl, as were both of my daughters. I asked all the questions -- is it necessary, is it recommended, why or why not, etc. I decided to go ahead and I know exactly why I made that choice based on scientific data. If someone else is informed of the scientific data and chooses against circumcision, I fully respect that and have no problem with it. I can tell you that the child displayed little evidence of pain, as I was right there with the doc as it was done, and it heals quite quickly. And no, not "everybody else" does it. The number of uncircumcised females in the US is increasing, actually. You might find the numbers surprising if you have time to look it up.
So you want to take your body cells from where the sun doesn't shine.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
We also owe a very very large portion of our current medical knowledge to the Nazis. If it wasn't for their 'human experiments' we wouldn't know some of the stuff we know today.
Where do you think we got the 'how long you can survive without food/water' stats?
Doesn't mean it was right.
Well here is one you did not consider. About one in every few thousand babies born is transsexual. That is, the neurological gender of their brain does not match the apparent sex of their body. Typically these people will desire surgical "correction" of their genitals latter in life, and availability of skin is one of the key variables that impact the outcome. Now I realize this is a rare occurrence, but it does happen, and since I'm transsexual myself and thus know just how shit it can be, I can only hope that neither of your sons will turn out to be transsexual. Then again, with sufficiently many babies being circ'd it follows that it will happen to some.
I also imagine it may have an impact on other types of re-constructive surgery, should your sons ever have the misfortune of being hurt in an accident or something.