Slashdot Mirror
Embryonic Stem Cell Retinal Implants Seem Safe, So Far
An anonymous reader writes "A biotechnology company said Monday that results from the world's first human trial using embryonic stem cells to treat eye diseases suggested that the new procedure appears to be safe four months after the cells were injected into the eyes of two blind patients. The study also describes visual improvements in patients, and experts said the findings hold promise for treating blindness in patients with currently incurable conditions like age-related macular degeneration in older patients and Stargardt's Disease, a main cause of blindness in young people."
The main reason for this (for those of you who haven't seen a neocognitron in a fourth-year machine learning course) is that the eye does a lot more pre-work for the brain than just blitting a grid of pixels down the optic nerve. Recent efforts attempted to do that, however. There's much more complex pattern recognition going on even at this most basic level, in addition to the loss of precision for the non-focal area, and that helps reduce the cognitive load to something we can fully utilize.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Please, inform yourself. This sort of ignorance is embarrassing. "Harvesting fetuses" is not how we get embryonic stem cells. Excess fertilized embryos are a byproduct of in vitro fertilization. These embryos (not fetuses) would be destroyed if not donated to science. The fertilized embryos are on the order of 50-150 undifferentiated cells -- not a fetus -- in a microscope, one appears to be a spherical blob. At this point, the stem cells are "cultured" -- fed, and allowed to multiply, just like we grow bacteria or other single-celled organisms.