Slashdot Mirror
Stem Cells Turn Hearing Back On
puddingebola sends this excerpt from an article at ScienceNow:
"Scientists have enabled deaf gerbils to hear again — with the help of transplanted cells that develop into nerves that can transmit auditory information from the ears to the brain. The advance, reported today in Nature, could be the basis for a therapy to treat various kinds of hearing loss. ... Rivolta and his colleagues knew that during embryonic development, a handful of proteins, including fibroblast growth factor (FGF) 3 and 10, are required for ears to form. So they exposed human embryonic stem cells to FGF3 and FGF10. Multiple types of cells formed, including precursor inner-ear hair cells, but they were also able to identify and isolate the cells beginning to differentiate into the desired spiral ganglion neurons. Then, they implanted the neuron precursor cells into the ears of gerbils with damaged ear neurons and followed the animals for 10 weeks. The function of the neurons was restored.'"
I lost hearing in my right ear several years ago from sudden hearing loss. I'd give almost anything to get it back. I have tinnitus in that ear so bad it almost hurts sometimes. Plus you have no idea how frustrating it is to hear a sound and NOT be able to tell where it came from. PLEASE fix it!
I have partial hearing loss due to nerve damage in one ear when I was 30. I now wear a hearing aid in that ear. I would love to have my hearing fixed without an aid.
Seriously, just fucking fund it already. Fuck the religious ones that want to live in the dark ages, this is SCIENCE and if it can make deaf kids hear and blind kids see, then fuck whatever piece of paper says it's immoral and fuck the assholes that try to stop it.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Those people have a right to their ignorant opinion. But no collective has a right to dictate the destiny of an individual.
It is certainly better to hear than not to hear, without a question. Moreover, I would welcome the ability to, say, see infrared or ultraviolet, or to sense the direction of a magnetic field in which I am immersed. I only have a positive attitude toward not having these abilities, because (most?) other people also don't have them.
Virgil is an anecdote. We have no access to a parallel universe in which a "control Virgil" lives who hasn't had his sight restored. Maybe that Virgil would have lost the will to live anyway. Virgil died of pneumonia only four months after the surgery. So all that we know about his experience is confined to a few weeks or months following the restoration of sight, not how he would have coped in the long run.
Wake me when the do this with non-Embryonic stem cells. I don't have an embryonic me lying around on ice to harvest.
--- Mercutio was right.