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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."
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... .
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.
No. The beta-amyloid plaques that damage and ultimately kill bain cells would still be present. The plaques themselves must be destroyed, not just throw billions of new neurons at the problem.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
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.
Your choice of words "Choice" and "Anti Choice" give insight into who's choice you give deference to. Last time I checked, the babies weren't given a choice.
And at what time to you "choose" to stop calling it "fetal tissue" and start calling it a "baby" (human, person or otherwise)??
How come you didn't call it "Pro-Life" and "Pro-death" ?? By simply choosing your words, you've clearly tried to frame the "choice" into something more palatable to your feelings.
Here's my challenge to you. Stop calling it "Anti-choice" and calling it by "Pro-Life" for a year. The side hasn't changed, only your words, see if your view on the subject changes. I'm not even suggesting you change it from "Pro-Choice" to "Pro-Death" or "Anti-life". Just stop calling it Anti-life and call it Pro-Life for a year.
You see, I bet you can't or won't be able to do it. And now you'll make excuses and attack me for even making such a suggestion.
After all, it is always easier to kill someone if you dehumanize them first. Jews are Pigs. Christians are devils. Muslims are evil doers. Blacks are apes. Women are property. Babies are fetal tissue.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
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.
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.
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.
Right, the same people who are in favor of killing unborn babies just because people don't want to have a baby, are in favor of killing unborn babies to harvest stem cells to use for medical research (even though all of the evidence points to those cells being of no medical use).
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison