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Cell Transplant Allows Paralyzed Man To Walk
New submitter tiberus sends word of a breakthrough medical treatment that has restored the ability to walk to a man who was paralyzed from the chest down after his spinal cord was severed in a knife attack. A research team from the UK, led by Professor Geoff Raisman, transplanted cells from the patient's nose, along with strips of nerve tissue from his ankle, to the place where the spine was severed. This allowed the fibers in the spinal cord to gradually reconnect.
The treatment used olfactory ensheathing cells (OECs) - specialist cells that form part of the sense of smell. ... In the first of two operations, surgeons removed one of the patient's olfactory bulbs and grew the cells in culture. Two weeks later they transplanted the OECs into the spinal cord, which had been cut through in the knife attack apart from a thin strip of scar tissue on the right. They had just a drop of material to work with - about 500,000 cells. About 100 micro-injections of OECs were made above and below the injury. Four thin strips of nerve tissue were taken from the patient's ankle and placed across an 8mm (0.3in) gap on the left side of the cord. ... Two years after the treatment, he can now walk outside the rehabilitation center using a frame.
This is truly great!
If only our daily "news" was filled with more with these types of stories than the typical FUD and propaganda perpetuated by these organizations.
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
I can walk! But now the only thing I can smell is back sweat.
I read some time ago that the olfactory cells are one of the few nerve cells that maintains the ability to reproduce and create new connections, then it seems that the researchers basically created a "hard hack" with that. Interesting, and hopefully it will be applicable in many similar cases.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
There have been several medical procedures that were piloted with embyronic stem cells first, then later they figured out how to do them with adult stem cells or other cells from the patient.
The point wasn't to use embyronic stem cells for treatments, that leads to immune compromise and rejection. The point is that embryos that were unused from IVF procedures and slated for disposal were able to provide some benefit before destruction, in the form of research.
Unless you're willing to volunteer your womb to implant these embryos then they never had a chance of becoming people anyway, and were one refrigeration accident away from being lost anyway.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I dunno, I still think the ignorant asses are the people arguing that a clump of cells without so much as a functioning brain stem can somehow be so special as to deserve special consideration.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Nice to see breakthrough research like this coming from a single-payer healthcare system like the UK. When people start saying that the only places that can afford groundbreaking medical research are the ones where the "customers" pay a fortune, it'll be good to be able to point them to things like this.
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Where is it illegal? Certainly not the US. Social Conservatives argued that federal funds were not to be used on embryonic research. That's not making it illegal. It was only illegal to create, grow and harvest embryos for the purpose of research - that's not the same thing as making it *illegal*.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
I don't think that was ever promised. Embryonic stem cells were seen as very promising for research and possibly treatment.
There's been one notable success:
http://healthland.time.com/201...
Other therapies have been significantly hampered by Government policy, but despite this some researchers went ahead. They found unforeseen obstacles like tumor formation, and unstable gene expression.
The problem with the Embryonic stem cell debate hasn't been the ethical concerns. Those are real, and should be address. But you need to know that there are those out there that used the debate not to fight Embryonic stem cell research, but to fight science itself. You don't want your tax dollars to go towards stem cell research? Fine, that's a reasonable request. But what happened was they not only pulled funding for Embryonic stem cell research, they also said that researcher couldn't receive ANY federal funding at all. For any other project. You were basically blacklisted if you even touched the topic. That had nothing to do with moral concerns, that was an attempt to use the governments muscle to kill the research entirely.
Embryonic Stem Cells had, and still have great medical promise. If your kid died from some disease, then a few years later research into stem cells lead them to some new drug that would have cured him, how would you have felt about the way this had been handled? Does it matter that they didn't find the cure? What's the next research they'll try to kill? Will it be the one that could have cured you?
Nah.
People coming in and demanding proof of things their politics made illegal to study are really annoying.
It's similarly illegal to study gun violence under a US public health research grant, even though every other class of mortality is nominally okay.
In my state, it's illegal to use state funds to research the effect of global warming on coastal water levels.
People who ban researching things for political reasons(rather than say consistency with existing laws outside of research) are harmful. There's something very wrong with the notion of not researching things that might reflect negatively on your ideology.
This is great. Now if we could only get a cell transplant that would allow idiots to think.
Proverbs 21:19
This is not a debate worth having again and again and again and again.
Presumably because you keep losing it, again and again and again?
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
It's almost as if some people just really want it to be legal to destroy human embryos.
In your imaginary land where any people are this hostile, what do you think is done with leftover embryos from fertility treatments, right now?
Do you think they're all frozen forever, just in case someone needs a spare implanted in their uterus?
Do you think that maybe they get grown in secret cloning vats that let them turn into human beings?
Or do you join us in reality land where they're put in a nice clean chamber labeled "biohazard" and hauled off by a medical waste company to be sterilized and destroyed. You're just going to have to learn to live in a reality where huge numbers of embryos are destroyed by the human body, excreted out unnoticed, and untold others are created in a lab so that desperate people can have children, only to be disposed of for a host of reasons, like in-viability or that previous implantations "took". Reality just doesn't treat them the way you imagine they are currently treated.
It's similarly illegal to study gun violence under a US public health research grant, even though every other class of mortality is nominally okay.
More pointedly, the US keeps statistics on deaths from gun violence, except the number of people killed by police. From: List of killings by law enforcement officers in the United States
Although Congress instructed the Attorney General in 1994 to compile and publish annual statistics on police use of excessive force, this was never carried out, and the FBI does not collect this data either.
Note: This was recently covered by The Daily Show on Comedy Central.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Or, and this is crazy. I'm totally aware of your argument, made that clear, and also made my contempt of the exact nonsense you spewed readily apparent, and I don't want have anything more to do with it.
I think it is referring different cases - initial trial involving three patients while not successful at least showed that treatment is safe. New attempt on Mr. Fidyka went much better.
In all of these examples, there's somebody else that's much closer that cares. But the embryo doesn't care, and if its mother doesn't care, why should I ?
Just the stories should be more accurate.
The research was mostly in UK but surgery was in Poland:
"Our team in Poland would be prepared to consider patients from anywhere in the world who are suitable for this therapy. They are likely to have had a knife wound injury where the spinal cord has been cleanly severed"
We should also incinerate our crops as worthless biological waste so that no corporation can profit from them. Because, you know, profit is evil.
The man was from Poland, the operation was in Poland and was conducted by polish team in hospital in Poland.
Oh, look, an article objecting to a specific methodology, that in no way was made illegal.
Okay. Those are equal. Yep. Look, your objection requires people to believe in a huge-criminology wide conspiracy to suppress data, whereas my objection just references a law on the books.
I'm not even going to refute what you're saying, because, hell, Straus is a criminologist, and I'm not. But I will accuse you of willful false equivalence. Don't do that.
Since it's not your money, why do you care?
I don't.
Since it's not your wife or husband, why do you care?
I don't.
Since it's not your dog, why do you care?
Since it's a living, breathing creature, unlike a blob of cells, mistreating it shows ones lack of civility, humanity and general lack of morals.
Since it's not your house, why do you care?
I don't, up to the point where your negligence in keeping your property maintained interferes with my property because critters from your area migrate to mine.
Since it's not your city, why do you care?
I don't.
Since it's not your book, why do you care?
I don't.
Since it's not your life, why do you care?
I don't. But then a blob of cells isn't a life.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
One of my family members is paralyzed from the waist down. They have limited mobility in one leg and none in the other. They can walk with a full leg brace and specialized crutches. It doesn't take all the connections to be severed to be paralyzed....
He has also recovered some bladder and bowel sensation and sexual function.
I'm happy to not be paralyzed and certainly hope to stay that way. But, if I was... I think these functions might be even more important to me then getting my legs back. Don't get me wrong, not being able to stand or walk would really suck. But.. a person with no leg function might get along in a wheel chair. Shitting oneself and not being able to enjoy sex... there just isn't a chair for that.
You don't find the idea of fertilizing an egg just so you can harvest the embryo creepy, and morally dubious? Seems creepy to me - if the problems can be solved a different way, lets do that.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
So you're argument, as I understand it is: "I don't care that it wasn't actually illegal, because this is really about why Bush was bad"? Or was it "I'm going to insist on my own private definition of illegal and yell at anyone who uses the normal meaning"?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
In this case I'd say it's more about sinuses.
A research team from the UK, led by Professor Geoff Raisman, transplanted cells from the patient's nose
RTFA.
UK team researched it TOGETHER with Polish team. TFA mentiones both teams, and two leading doctors, one in UK, one in Poland.
Polish team performed the actual transplantation (practical part). It was led by a Polish doctor.
It's $%&^ Enigma all over again, "solved" by British who conveniently forgot it was Polish team who solved it first.
Well, in the end, you are really just a cluster of cells like an embryo. Who are you to think you are so special. Consciousness is just a series of chemicals and electrical impulses moving through organized cells. In the grand scheme of things, it doesn't mean anything at all.
Human embryos are apparently more human than you are. When you declare "let's kill people out of convenience because they don't know any different!" you forsook your own humanity for some shitty rationalization. Embryos ARE life, you fucking idiot. That's not even debatable.