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Scientists Turn Skin Into Blood
Breakthru writes "In an important breakthrough, scientists at McMaster University have discovered how to make human blood from adult human skin. The discovery, published in the prestigious science journal Nature today, could mean that in the foreseeable future people needing blood for surgery, cancer treatment or treatment of other blood conditions like anemia will be able to have blood created from a patch of their own skin to provide transfusions. Clinical trials could begin as soon as 2012."
In an important breakthrough, scientists at McMaster University have discovered how to make human blood from adult human skin.
So not only will it clot, it can tan?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
That whole "walking around with no skin" situation could be a bit of a problem.
Oops, sorry, a real link.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
So they'll be able to grind up people and use them for blood transfusions, right?
Both sides of that argument had a lot of wrong impressions and misunderstandings. Using embryonic stem cells wan't directly about treatment, it was about research, there were properties that they wanted to understand. The biomedical community needed to learn how they work so that that knowledge can be used as a baseline to compare treatments. Interviewees on Science Friday did a pretty good job of explaining what they were looking for and why embryonic stem cells were desired for research. As for treatment though, I don't think ESC were ever going to be used in treatments except for very limited trials.
No, because most of that is water. Anyways, if you read the actual article in Nature, you will find out how much skin it takes. The information you want is in the supplementary information and they don't put that behind the paywall.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/extref/nature09591-s1.pdf
A good question. The backwards conversion is impossible because the vast majority of blood cells are RBCs (Red Blood Cells or erythrocytes) and these have gotten rid of their nucleus, making them a cellular dead end doomed to destruction in about 120 days.
Also, blood is mostly free water (plasma) and when RBCs are created their progenitor cells divide many times in the production process. Assuming that this process they're using is similar, you're talking about impressive volume multiplication in the conversion from skin to blood.
Then again.... I'm an idiot .....
...... and idiots rule the world....
Cut off a patch of skin. Yeah, that'll stop the bleeding!
Then you should probably shower more often.
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
You should probably be aware that not all Christians are Catholics. There are plenty of Christians who believe in birth control (including many Catholics who disagree with their church over it).
Most of them don't believe in abortion as a convenient form of birth control, though. Contraception is much easier, safer, and cheaper for the mother than abortion, even if you do think abortion is grand.
Personally, I'm against abortion in principle unless it's an unusually dangerous pregnancy for the mother or the result of rape or incest. However, I know that making it illegal wouldn't stop it. It'd just drive it underground and make everybody involved -- mothers, fathers, doctors and nurses performing -- worse off. I think it should be, as President Clinton said, "legal, safe, and rare".
Now, about the difference between IVF and abortion... IVF is not abortion. The embryos from IVF used for ECS research have not been implanted then scraped out by a surgeon. They are the spare embryos that were never implanted in the uterus. These are left over from women and couples trying to get pregnant and have kids, not preventing it. It's not about birth control in the common sense of the phrase, which is preventing births.
Your argument seems to confuse quite a few topics. You also generalize quite a few groups into one you clearly disagree with the most. In your quest to vilify people as simpletons who don't grasp the issues at hand, you have oversimplified the topics and (probably intentionally) failed to even acknowledge the issues at hand are much more complex than you mention.
Even if it is a replacement, we're still years behind where we would be if the hicks didn't insist that we throw out the unused embryos.
First sentence: bigoted language. Sounds like we're off to a good start.
As near as I can gather you are intending this post toward the 'life-begins-at-conception' branch of the American pro life movement. In which case you are a bit confused in saying they "insist we throw out the unused embryos" given that they fight tooth and nail specifically to prevent unused embryos from being discarded. They often oppose IVF itself precisely because excess embryos are thrown out.
As it stands we're destroying the extra stem cells from IVF instead of using them because the right won't allow scientists to use them.
That's quite an uninformed statement. There really is no restriction on what can or cannot be done with embryos (apart from I believe in the state of Indiana). They are thrown out largely because there is no use from them. The restrictions which have existed (until Obama overturned them) regard limiting federally funded research to certain pre-existent lines.
The reality is that we've got plenty of embryonic stem cells available without creating any more. Which really ought to be where the morals come into it.
Where, exactly? At the point you align morals with "doing what's convenient and what we would have done anyway" I don't think you've really addressed a moral question at all.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
Personally, I'm against abortion in principle unless it's an unusually dangerous pregnancy for the mother or the result of rape or incest.
How about in the case of a 15-year-old girl whose Christian parents who wouldn't talk about sex at all with her for fear that her hearing about it would encourage her to do it? So the girl doesn't know the fundamentals and trusts her new boyfriend who insists "condoms don't feel good" and "I'll pull out".
What I'm asking is: how do you feel about unwanted and highly personally destructive pregnancies ultimately enabled by ignorance due to religion?
"Oh no... he found the
Umm if you follow the Bible, God was willing to personally kill everything on the earth save a handful of people and animals. I don't see why a few billion embryos would be a issue for him, since he's not actively killing them but just allowing a natural process. If you want to place blame on him for his design then I think that opens up much bigger list of issues in human design.