Re:Game ideas that would be highly not fun
on
Imagination In Games
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· Score: 2, Funny
Yeah, I had a terrible idea for a game, an italian plumber who breaks bricks with his head. Oooh, or some type of space royalty that has to roll up things to make a star.
Not to mention you missed being the first one to point that out by half an hour!
I tease. I was of course the one who screwed up, and it is important to correct people who accidentally talk trash on the wrong person. Not correcting me would be helping the bad strategic visions, thank you.
First of all, I don't think "What do I care" is anything but flamebaiting. Who cares if you don't care?
Second, if they're the same "strategic vision" that the article is talking about, their webpage says "Strategic Vision has worldwide experience developing tools to measure decision-making, human behavior, attitudes and perceptions. Its globally relevant, comprehensive theory of human behavior creates the most effective strategies addressing decision-making in product development and communications in the widest variety of fields, including automotive, customer service, government and politics, medicine and healthcare, organizational and jury, travel and leisure, food and beverages, and education." So they probably report on anything you will pay them to poll on, or rather, anything you will pay them to make a graph from nothing.
Lastly, a quote in TFA by the company gives you plenty of reason to care:
[W]e categorically deny them and will refute them. We have a call into our attorney on this and fully intend to take action that will vindicate us...he has attempted to do severe damage to our reputation and what is he going to do when we disprove him just say I am sorry. That isn't enough at this point.
There you go: the company is mad about being uncovered and is doing the next step any stupid assholes do when their misdeeds come to light: sue in a vain attempt to keep the information from becoming well known. Therefore, -everyone- should know they're faking the results. I'm tempted to e-mail all their clients with a link to the article. If they go out of buisiness, maybe other shitty companies will finally realize you don't sue people who expose you as charlatans.
But a handfull of 'em did look useful, rather than just politically correct but probably counterproductive. (My pick: Free online educational materials.)
You're saying free online education materials would be counterproductive?
Anyway, that was my pick as well. I've heard the med school here for example typically uses really really old anatomy diagrams since almost anything else is copyrighted*, costs an arm and a leg (sorry), and med students refuse to spend over $10 on materials. And obviously anatomy hasn't changed much in the last hundred years, but it is disconcerting that copyright/trademark/etc* limit future doctors' education.
Not being a med student or anyone who deals with them, I don't know what that's all about, but this was coming from one of the anatomy professors, and that was before the UC system raised tuition.
It's been my experience that professors and staff rarely consider the cost of materials. Being online might not help matters though, I was in a class a few years ago in which an older version of the textbook was online. I found this out halfway through the course, the profesor didn't seem to be aware of that. Fortunately, my strategy of "procrastinate on buying the book" really helped me out there. It's sister strategy of "procrastinate on studying" really didn't, but that's another matter.
*copyright/ trademark / whatever, I don't care, you know what type of laws I'm talking about, and WANAL.
Where... where what? Oh. He went back in time to finish the post.
Anyway, GP I think was referring to different mechanics that braid had that were not in POP. The "rewind time from death" was in Prince of persia before Braid. But Braid had pads on which you could stand and be outside of time or the rewind/forward time controls. In a seperate mechanic, Braid had worlds where you would do one thing, say jump down to a lower platform and hit a switch to open the door on the upper level. You then rewound time, door goes back closed, but when you let time go forward, a shadow form of you would redo the action you just did, you'd see the shadow jump down and open the door. You could then move through the door.
I never played prince of persia, but I was under the impression neither mechanic was seen in it.
The new rachet and clank sounds like it has a more complicated combination of both of those mechanics seen in braid
Even better are the time pads. You stand on one and "record" your actions in time. Then you stand on the other and interact with your past self going through its actions. In the simplest puzzles you stand on a pressure-sensitive switch for yourself so you can walk through a door. In the more intricate puzzles you have to record sections of your performances multiple times in a type of choreographed dance to get to where you're going, often using the time explosives in multiple ways.
Who spends $15 to go to the movies? All the theaters here are $8.75 for a ticket
The kids, teens, and other young people who make up most of the moviegoing demographic, that's who. Factor in ridiculously sized and even more ridiculously overpriced soda and popcorn and $15 might be on the low end.
Same thing with games, the people buying most of the games have a lot of income that is disposed of on entertainment because they have much more time and much fewer financial obligations than many of us. I have more money than I did back when I was buying a new game every week, but I also am willing to spend less per game now. In retrospect, several of those games I paid $50 or $60 for I wouldn't have bought for $10.
The bigger commodity for at least me though is time. I typically have less than 10 hours a week to play games in. When I was in college, if I bought a crappy game I'd eventually play it because I ran out of good games. Today I don't even get to most of the games I'm very interested in. Left 4 dead seems fun. Maybe a few years from now, after I finally beat Fallout, Bioshock, and Rock Band, I'll think about getting it. Anyway, lack of time means I'm more discerning. I dont' want to pay $60 if there's a good chance I'll only play it for an hour before getting more interested in Fallout, and the new game will sit on my shelf for a year.
So I blame the kids that make up most of the entertainment industry's profit. They're the ones who have poor tastes, too much money, and too much time. High prices and low quality are partly their fault.
These are self-renewing cells. It's not like you need to sacrifice one embryo for each patient.
True -- in some previous treatments, each patient may be implanted with brain tissue from as many as seven aborted donors [nytimes.com]. Granted, that was before isolated stem cells were in use,
The article there was talking about fetal brain tissue, not embryonic stem cells. Fetal brain tissue cannot be expanded in vitro, ESC do. That 1992 study used seven fetuses presumably for that reason: there is so little tissue per fetus and you can't just grow it to as much as you need.
but for ESCs to move from the laboratory into the doctor's office, unless we plan on keeping all of our patients on immunosuppressants, I was under the impression that SCNT or some other form of "therapeutic cloning" is necessary to obtain ESCs that are usable cells that won't cause rejection.
Right, which is one reason why IPSC is more promising. And that reminds me we've gotten off on a tangent. When you implied that IVF would not supply enough ESC for -therapy- I should have pointed out that ESC probably aren't going to be used for therapy, they're used for research.
If ESC and not IPSC is found to be useful for therapy, we would need to do cloning and harvest those embryos to avoid tissue rejection, or we would need to come up with a way to modify the ESC to avoid that problem. Both ways have technical obstacles that would need to be overcome, and it's anyone's guess as to which we would overcome first.
You are right when you say
All of what I've read has pointed to either pointed to SCNT or induced pluri-potency in ASCs as the "best ideas running" for obtaining usable stem cells for treatment.
but again, ESC are still essential for basic research.
I don't think enough people would be willing to spend their tax money on defense to actually support an army.
Are placing the government's role in scientific research on parallel with the government's role in national defense?
I only meant to point out that people don't get complete control over where their taxes go. Having said that, I'm certain the tax money the government puts towards research will have a much much greater more positive impact on the world in the long term than the equivalent spent on increasing our defensive capabilities.
Relative to ASC treatments, the numbers would seem to show that ESC isn't as promising (unless you feel there is no true distinction?).
Again you're only thinking in terms of treatments. ESC has more value in basic research. And again, it's way too soon to make that call. I said previously that penicillin was discovered about 40 years before it really started saving lives. Give ESC 40 years at least before you say they have no theraputic value.
You also seem to feel that there is no moral component to any of this, and you seem frustrated that anyone would balk at the idea of ESC research and treatment.
I've never had any frustration with people who feel it's unethical. I myself have questions about the morality of ESC. I think it should be funded, and I think most of the people arguing against it present bad reasoning, but morality in research is never clear cut.
If ESC treatments become viable, IVF leftovers do not provide a sufficient supply for more than a tiny fraction of the people who would request treatment
Citation needed. These are self-renewing cells. It's not like you need to sacrifice one embryo for each patient.
Besides, many people will still have ethical problems with forcibly "harvesting" parts / cells from people, even if they are headed for the incinerator. Didn't we just have this same debate a few years ago with harvesting condemned criminals for organs? "And none of you guys seem to realize that these organs are being taken from people who were headed for the electric chair anyway."
You slipped "people" in there. You realize of course that's a not exactly a clear cut issue. It's a major difference between the execution and ESC.
In a word, if you want it, spend your own money on it, and don't just get upset and call people ignorant when they don't share your priorities. Other people have legitimate needs for this cash, and there's only so much of it to go around.
I don't think enough people would be willing to spend their tax money on defense to actually support an army. I don't want any of my tax money going overseas to Iraq or Israel, yet that's not an option. The idea that you should get to decide where your taxes go has been thoroughly rejected in our government, because when it comes down to it, no one actually WANTS to be paying taxes at all, and few if any people realize the actual value of all government programs.
That's not to say you shouldn't have a right to influence how the government spends your money, but "I don't want my tax money to go to this so it shouldn't" isn't a convincing argument to me.
There isn't enough cash to go around, but you should be trying to cut the waste as opposed to promising but not yet mature technology.
I think it's a bit unfair to call them an ignorant hick just because they don't place quite the priority on stem cell research as you do, and would rather see the government shuttle that money elsewhere.
I think it is unfair as well, which is why I didn't call them hicks, nor did I say they were ignorant just because they don't have the same priorities that I do. I say they're ignorant on the subject of stem cells because they ARE ignorant ON THE SUBJECT OF STEM CELLS. I don't think people should get a say on highly tecnhnical issues when they remain stubbornly uninformed on those issues.
He just got served!... with some information about stem cells. And also served as in "got his deserved comeuppance." Both senses of served are true, really.
One reason it matters is that we are forever being told how embryonic stem cell research is going to find the cure for every disease under the sun,
The new line of thinking is that Induced pluripotent stem cells (IPSC) will do all that ESC was promised to do. IPSC comes from your own cells which have been modified to be like ESC.
Stem cells were never said to be a cure for all diseases. Cancer and infectious diseases, for example, were never potential diseases to be treated with stem cells. Regenerative medicine only.
...and anyone who thinks the money should be diverted to research into stem cells from alternative sources is a religious nut who should shut up
Frankly, some of you guys are seriously misinformed. It's easy to write off people who honestly have ethical concerns, when others are running around using religion to try to prevent research, and saying things like "scientists are going to pay you to have an abortion for spare parts!!!" And none of you guys seem to realize that ESC research is done on embryos that were headed for the incincerator anyway.
On the funding issue too, I'm wary of the uninformed public making choices as to what needs to be spent where when they rarely have the context or understanding of what the research is supposed to accomplish. Most of the research going on in ESC is basic research not intended to directly produce cures immediately. Few people also realize that you have to invest in basic research before you can get the end result. The current story is a good example of that. I posted a link to their patents, the techniques neuralstem seems to use, take a look at them. Everything they do can be traced back to studies that were basic research. If you were to look at the papers and the labs that produced them, likely none of them would have been trying to directly create the cure to ALS or spinal cord injuries, but they were essential to get to where we are now. More basic research might be needed in case this doesn't work out and they need to go back to the drawing board.
Basically it's complicated, and funding should be set by the NIH and other boards who invest a lot of time learning about what's essential and what isn't. It shouldn't be a democratic process because then we'd end up spending half our money on "Does prayer heal?" and we'd all be smoking like chimneys wondering why we were dropping dead. I don't mean to sound elitist, I think most people are -capable- of learning enough to make good decisions on funding of stem cells, but they clearly haven't.
nearly 100 current treatments using stem cells, there is not a single one that uses embryonic stem cells. If this were better known, then all the resources being wasted on this dead-end research could perhaps be used more profitably.
Another point I should make: the public doesn't have the patience for research. Often times, I don't have the patience for my own research. But even though we've known about stem cells for what feels like a long time, it's important to realize that we've only known about stem cells for 10 years or so. That's an incredibly short time for a field to come to fuition. Penicillin took about 40 years from discovery to curing diseases on a wide scale if I remember correctly, and that was a heck of a lot simpler than stem cell biology. It is WAY too early to be saying "okay, ESC isn't going anywhere, it's time we drop it."
ESC has produced valuable things BTW. Most of what we know about stem cells, including adult stem cells, originates from studies on ESC, and we have a lot more to learn from ESC. That's why the research is going to continue even if we have managed finally to cure spinal cord injuries.
Well, I'd say RTFA, but it did seem to dance around that issue for no good reason...
It seems that it is in fact adult stem cells. They harvest them... possibly from your brain or spinal cord, I don't know.
As far as ethics go, I do have to point out that the adult stem cell field didn't start independently. A lot of what we know about adult stem cells we only know because we learned it first in embryonic stem cells. If this works, it's fruit of the ESC research tree. If you're not okay with ESC research but want treatments from it, you're still going to have to answer some ethical questions for yourself.
This ignores the fact that stem cells take their orders about what to become from their neighbors
I think that part alone is oversimplifying things, but what exactly ignores that? The growth factors listed in the patent are the same factors present in the niche where these stem cells are maintained, combinations of them keep the stem cells proliferating while they're expanding the isolated stem cells. The second patent, the chemicals which induce neuronal development, presumably do so through the same signaling pathways used by the microenvironment to direct neural stem cells to differentiate.
If you're implying that just dumping stem cells into a wound site in the CNS would be enough to patch the damage, you should know that there have been some trials testing that. They ended poorly for the mice. I believe some researchers in China tried it on human patients anyway, they developed teratomas and died quickly as I recall. Teratomas are the result of stem cells differentiating inefficiently. Even stem cells which have started to go down the neuronal path would have to be directed. For one thing, I'd worry that all the cells would turn into glial cells, no neurons. The CNS seems reluctant to add new neurons, wheras some glial cell populations get replentished.
I'd expect just dumping stem cells on the hole would be a little like trying to repair a hole in the side of a building by throwing wet concrete at it.
and from specialized cell groups called Fibroblasts.
Fibroblasts aren't cell groups, they are cells. A fibroblast is a cell. I don't believe they instruct neural stem cells though I could be wrong about that. Notch signaling: the neural stem cells appear to regulate their own populations. There are other factors, some that I'm not too familiar with, but I've never heard anything suggesting fibroblasts regulate neural stem cells, and they certainly aren't the only things regulating them. Fibroblasts definitely do not regulate all stem cells.
These structures would still be present in a person with Lou Garrig's disease (how ever you spell that.) since these structures form during ebryonic development in humans.
Fibroblasts are present in adults, but I disagree with the logic of "they should still be there since they were there in embryonic stages." You also have gills as an embryo. Those don't stay. Most of your neural stem cells also dissapear early in life.
Well see, we have this massive bureaucracy in the USA called the "Food and Drug Administration", whose job it is to kill people by impeding medical research.
I was going to say that cells have this massive "bureacracy" they call "normal cell biology" that makes nearly everything else look like a children's book, and that tends to slow down research. And there are other "bureacracies" like
-A complicated central nervous system -Ethics -Lack of resources -Researchers need to sleep, eat, go to the bathroom, play videogames, etc -The fact that no one really has figured out how to repair a central nervous system and we don't have a crystal ball that will tell us these things
that really bog down the process even further. I'd write a letter to God (all of them), whoever established rules of causality in our universe, whoever/whatever designed/caused us to evolve this way, and the first multicellular organism complaining. With all those bases covered, we're sure to get things changed so we can finally get somewhere fast with medical research.
Wonder how much the treatment will cost? How many kids don't get to eat at school so that someone gets this treatment.
This website estimates 700 billion dollars in direct costs, if we figure a school lunch costs somewhere in the neighborhood of 7 dollars (have no idea what the actual average cost would be,) that's about 100 billion lunches I guess. Somewhere in there.
Oh wait a minute, you said treatment, as in the spinal cord repair. I thought for a minute you were talking about the Iraq war, Mr. Center-right conservative. Sorry, my bad.
I have no idea how much the treatment will cost. Pocket change to us, but as I always say, a tax dollar spent on something besides bombing someone is a terrible waste of a dollar.
That's what I'm guessing too. TFA is ridiculously underinformative. Neuralstem doesn't seem to be talking specifics for some reason.
A video on their website was -slightly- more informative. They make lines of neural stem cells and inject them into the damaged part. That to me was somewhat questionable. Injecting undifferentiated, replicating cells into your central nervous system, even if they're neural stem cells sounds dangerous. You want the specific type of neuron there, and enough glial cells. Without directing their differentiation, I would expect you'd end up with a random mix of cells, or possibly a glioma.
It mentioned that these were patented methods. I don't know much about patents, but I did find this patent issued to neuralstem biopharmecuticals ltd (same company?).
The abstract to that patent:
A systematic and efficient method for establishing stable neural stem cell lines and neuronal progenitor lines is described. The resulting cell lines provide robust, simple, and reproducible cultures of human and other mammalian neurons in commercially useful mass quantities while maintaining normal karyotypes and normal neuronal phenotypes.
What it actually seems to cover is nothing revoultionary. They isolate a neuronal stem cell, culture it in a wide variety of commonly used growth factors for 30 divisions, transfect the C myc gene, and then culture it in the same growth factors and/or whole serum. That's to make a line of cells. C-myc by the way was one of the transcription factors used to make induced pluripotent stem cells, and is associated with many cancers, which is worrisome. Nothing in that really suprises me. I'd be interested to hear from slashdot's armchair lawyers (or real lawyers) as to whether or not you can simply patent a combination of common techniques to make a line of stem cells.
What is more interesting to me is another patent that Neuralstem has, Use of fuse nicotinamides to promote neurogenesis. The abstract for that one:
The present invention provides a group of compounds found to increase the number of neurons derived from stem cells for use as a therapeutic agent in neurological conditions or diseases. In one embodiment of the present invention, the compounds are used to detect the mechanism by which the number of neurons is increased.
I'm less of an expert on this, it's a lot of biochemistry I'm not familiar with, but from the summary:
the present invention is related to classes of compound structures that are shown to be particularly effective in promoting neurogenesis includingcompounds of the type, fused imidazoles, aminopyrimidines, nicotinamides, aminomethyl phenoxypiperidines and aryloxypiperidines
It seems they have a patent on compounds which have been shown to nudge stem cells towards making neurons. This might be their answer to the first problem I mentioned: not wanting to inject undifferentiated cells into your spine or brain.
I'm guessing their technique involves 1. Surgery to get tissue samples which would be enriched in neural stem cells (I've heard the cells next to the ventricles in your brain are good spots for that) 2. They take those cells and put them in their culture media that causes the stem cells to divide 3. They transfect c-myc to increase the yeild 4. They harvest the undifferentiated cells and incubate them with their differentiation compounds before or as they 5. Inject the mix into your damaged spinal cord.
If they moved on to humans, I'm guessing they've already demonstrated this works to a degree and doesn't cause a lot of cancers in mice or other animal models. The results on that are probably published, but I've wasted enough time here.
Had they told the U.S. about this system, however, the U.S. would have tried to plan around it. Think of this as an ace up their sleeve.
Just to be clear, that's the logic that was supposed to convince the soviets themselves to keep cool, the logic doesn't actually work as the Strangelove quote points out. The article mentions this specifically, that "It's a secret so they can't beat it" doesn't actually make any sense.
Prop 65. I can't help but think that had those same ideas come up in the legislature, lobbyists would have corrected it quickly (they sometimes do act in everyone's best interest). They would have pointed out that you shouldn't have to put that up on parking lots, because anyone eating oil, gas, antifreeze, or anything else in a parking garage, you're probably too messed up in the head to read a warning sign. They also would have pointed out that the thing would just benefit the lawyers.
As bad as our politicians are at making good laws, the voting public is often far worse.
Moderations are often strange and mysterious, but in this case they weren't exactly the same things. For one thing rather than just -speculating- that the researchers provided information as to how they paralyzed the rats, I provided the link. I also explained WHY it sometimes seems incomplete.
Not that it made my post on-topic and insightful as opposed to offtopic, just that may have been some of the odd thinking behind the moderations.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I had a terrible idea for a game, an italian plumber who breaks bricks with his head. Oooh, or some type of space royalty that has to roll up things to make a star.
Not to mention you missed being the first one to point that out by half an hour!
I tease. I was of course the one who screwed up, and it is important to correct people who accidentally talk trash on the wrong person. Not correcting me would be helping the bad strategic visions, thank you.
I hereby take back everything I said about Strategic Vision and reapply it to Strategic Vision, LLC, times two.
First of all, I don't think "What do I care" is anything but flamebaiting. Who cares if you don't care?
Second, if they're the same "strategic vision" that the article is talking about, their webpage says
"Strategic Vision has worldwide experience developing tools to measure decision-making, human behavior, attitudes and perceptions. Its globally relevant, comprehensive theory of human behavior creates the most effective strategies addressing decision-making in product development and communications in the widest variety of fields, including automotive, customer service, government and politics, medicine and healthcare, organizational and jury, travel and leisure, food and beverages, and education." So they probably report on anything you will pay them to poll on, or rather, anything you will pay them to make a graph from nothing.
Their self-reported client list. Granted, they may have just made that list up as well.
Lastly, a quote in TFA by the company gives you plenty of reason to care:
There you go: the company is mad about being uncovered and is doing the next step any stupid assholes do when their misdeeds come to light: sue in a vain attempt to keep the information from becoming well known. Therefore, -everyone- should know they're faking the results. I'm tempted to e-mail all their clients with a link to the article. If they go out of buisiness, maybe other shitty companies will finally realize you don't sue people who expose you as charlatans.
Bwhahahah, sometimes I say ridiculous things.
I submitted an idea to Project 10^100. A damned good one too.
Was your idea "develop self-confidence?" Because I think they may have rejected that one as being done already :-)
But a handfull of 'em did look useful, rather than just politically correct but probably counterproductive. (My pick: Free online educational materials.)
You're saying free online education materials would be counterproductive?
Anyway, that was my pick as well. I've heard the med school here for example typically uses really really old anatomy diagrams since almost anything else is copyrighted*, costs an arm and a leg (sorry), and med students refuse to spend over $10 on materials. And obviously anatomy hasn't changed much in the last hundred years, but it is disconcerting that copyright/trademark/etc* limit future doctors' education.
Not being a med student or anyone who deals with them, I don't know what that's all about, but this was coming from one of the anatomy professors, and that was before the UC system raised tuition.
It's been my experience that professors and staff rarely consider the cost of materials. Being online might not help matters though, I was in a class a few years ago in which an older version of the textbook was online. I found this out halfway through the course, the profesor didn't seem to be aware of that. Fortunately, my strategy of "procrastinate on buying the book" really helped me out there. It's sister strategy of "procrastinate on studying" really didn't, but that's another matter.
*copyright/ trademark / whatever, I don't care, you know what type of laws I'm talking about, and WANAL.
Please persist in pursuing pointless pastimes, people.
Where... where what? Oh. He went back in time to finish the post.
Anyway, GP I think was referring to different mechanics that braid had that were not in POP. The "rewind time from death" was in Prince of persia before Braid. But Braid had pads on which you could stand and be outside of time or the rewind/forward time controls. In a seperate mechanic, Braid had worlds where you would do one thing, say jump down to a lower platform and hit a switch to open the door on the upper level. You then rewound time, door goes back closed, but when you let time go forward, a shadow form of you would redo the action you just did, you'd see the shadow jump down and open the door. You could then move through the door.
I never played prince of persia, but I was under the impression neither mechanic was seen in it.
The new rachet and clank sounds like it has a more complicated combination of both of those mechanics seen in braid
Who spends $15 to go to the movies? All the theaters here are $8.75 for a ticket
The kids, teens, and other young people who make up most of the moviegoing demographic, that's who. Factor in ridiculously sized and even more ridiculously overpriced soda and popcorn and $15 might be on the low end.
Same thing with games, the people buying most of the games have a lot of income that is disposed of on entertainment because they have much more time and much fewer financial obligations than many of us. I have more money than I did back when I was buying a new game every week, but I also am willing to spend less per game now. In retrospect, several of those games I paid $50 or $60 for I wouldn't have bought for $10.
The bigger commodity for at least me though is time. I typically have less than 10 hours a week to play games in. When I was in college, if I bought a crappy game I'd eventually play it because I ran out of good games. Today I don't even get to most of the games I'm very interested in. Left 4 dead seems fun. Maybe a few years from now, after I finally beat Fallout, Bioshock, and Rock Band, I'll think about getting it. Anyway, lack of time means I'm more discerning. I dont' want to pay $60 if there's a good chance I'll only play it for an hour before getting more interested in Fallout, and the new game will sit on my shelf for a year.
So I blame the kids that make up most of the entertainment industry's profit. They're the ones who have poor tastes, too much money, and too much time. High prices and low quality are partly their fault.
Get your ass to Mars, ... Get your ass to Mars, ... Get your ass to Mars, ...
Well, okay, but he will need more than just frozen water, he eats a lot of oats. Also hates it when people tell him to do things three times.
I've said it a dozen times on Slashdot already.
MozeeToby has said something a dozen times on slashdot and some people still don't have it tattooed on their foreheads yet? :-P
These are self-renewing cells. It's not like you need to sacrifice one embryo for each patient.
True -- in some previous treatments, each patient may be implanted with brain tissue from as many as seven aborted donors [nytimes.com]. Granted, that was before isolated stem cells were in use,
The article there was talking about fetal brain tissue, not embryonic stem cells. Fetal brain tissue cannot be expanded in vitro, ESC do. That 1992 study used seven fetuses presumably for that reason: there is so little tissue per fetus and you can't just grow it to as much as you need.
but for ESCs to move from the laboratory into the doctor's office, unless we plan on keeping all of our patients on immunosuppressants, I was under the impression that SCNT or some other form of "therapeutic cloning" is necessary to obtain ESCs that are usable cells that won't cause rejection.
Right, which is one reason why IPSC is more promising. And that reminds me we've gotten off on a tangent. When you implied that IVF would not supply enough ESC for -therapy- I should have pointed out that ESC probably aren't going to be used for therapy, they're used for research.
If ESC and not IPSC is found to be useful for therapy, we would need to do cloning and harvest those embryos to avoid tissue rejection, or we would need to come up with a way to modify the ESC to avoid that problem. Both ways have technical obstacles that would need to be overcome, and it's anyone's guess as to which we would overcome first.
You are right when you say
All of what I've read has pointed to either pointed to SCNT or induced pluri-potency in ASCs as the "best ideas running" for obtaining usable stem cells for treatment.
but again, ESC are still essential for basic research.
I don't think enough people would be willing to spend their tax money on defense to actually support an army.
Are placing the government's role in scientific research on parallel with the government's role in national defense?
I only meant to point out that people don't get complete control over where their taxes go. Having said that, I'm certain the tax money the government puts towards research will have a much much greater more positive impact on the world in the long term than the equivalent spent on increasing our defensive capabilities.
Relative to ASC treatments, the numbers would seem to show that ESC isn't as promising (unless you feel there is no true distinction?).
Again you're only thinking in terms of treatments. ESC has more value in basic research. And again, it's way too soon to make that call. I said previously that penicillin was discovered about 40 years before it really started saving lives. Give ESC 40 years at least before you say they have no theraputic value.
You also seem to feel that there is no moral component to any of this, and you seem frustrated that anyone would balk at the idea of ESC research and treatment.
I've never had any frustration with people who feel it's unethical. I myself have questions about the morality of ESC. I think it should be funded, and I think most of the people arguing against it present bad reasoning, but morality in research is never clear cut.
If ESC treatments become viable, IVF leftovers do not provide a sufficient supply for more than a tiny fraction of the people who would request treatment
Citation needed. These are self-renewing cells. It's not like you need to sacrifice one embryo for each patient.
Besides, many people will still have ethical problems with forcibly "harvesting" parts / cells from people, even if they are headed for the incinerator. Didn't we just have this same debate a few years ago with harvesting condemned criminals for organs? "And none of you guys seem to realize that these organs are being taken from people who were headed for the electric chair anyway."
You slipped "people" in there. You realize of course that's a not exactly a clear cut issue. It's a major difference between the execution and ESC.
In a word, if you want it, spend your own money on it, and don't just get upset and call people ignorant when they don't share your priorities. Other people have legitimate needs for this cash, and there's only so much of it to go around.
I don't think enough people would be willing to spend their tax money on defense to actually support an army. I don't want any of my tax money going overseas to Iraq or Israel, yet that's not an option. The idea that you should get to decide where your taxes go has been thoroughly rejected in our government, because when it comes down to it, no one actually WANTS to be paying taxes at all, and few if any people realize the actual value of all government programs.
That's not to say you shouldn't have a right to influence how the government spends your money, but "I don't want my tax money to go to this so it shouldn't" isn't a convincing argument to me.
There isn't enough cash to go around, but you should be trying to cut the waste as opposed to promising but not yet mature technology.
I think it's a bit unfair to call them an ignorant hick just because they don't place quite the priority on stem cell research as you do, and would rather see the government shuttle that money elsewhere.
I think it is unfair as well, which is why I didn't call them hicks, nor did I say they were ignorant just because they don't have the same priorities that I do. I say they're ignorant on the subject of stem cells because they ARE ignorant ON THE SUBJECT OF STEM CELLS. I don't think people should get a say on highly tecnhnical issues when they remain stubbornly uninformed on those issues.
He just got served!... with some information about stem cells. And also served as in "got his deserved comeuppance." Both senses of served are true, really.
Well not really guessing, the video says something like "takes your stem cells."
Anyway, the current buzzword is induced pluripotent stem cell... and terrorism. Nano. Biofuel.
One reason it matters is that we are forever being told how embryonic stem cell research is going to find the cure for every disease under the sun,
The new line of thinking is that Induced pluripotent stem cells (IPSC) will do all that ESC was promised to do. IPSC comes from your own cells which have been modified to be like ESC.
Stem cells were never said to be a cure for all diseases. Cancer and infectious diseases, for example, were never potential diseases to be treated with stem cells. Regenerative medicine only.
...and anyone who thinks the money should be diverted to research into stem cells from alternative sources is a religious nut who should shut up
Frankly, some of you guys are seriously misinformed. It's easy to write off people who honestly have ethical concerns, when others are running around using religion to try to prevent research, and saying things like "scientists are going to pay you to have an abortion for spare parts!!!" And none of you guys seem to realize that ESC research is done on embryos that were headed for the incincerator anyway.
On the funding issue too, I'm wary of the uninformed public making choices as to what needs to be spent where when they rarely have the context or understanding of what the research is supposed to accomplish. Most of the research going on in ESC is basic research not intended to directly produce cures immediately. Few people also realize that you have to invest in basic research before you can get the end result. The current story is a good example of that. I posted a link to their patents, the techniques neuralstem seems to use, take a look at them. Everything they do can be traced back to studies that were basic research. If you were to look at the papers and the labs that produced them, likely none of them would have been trying to directly create the cure to ALS or spinal cord injuries, but they were essential to get to where we are now. More basic research might be needed in case this doesn't work out and they need to go back to the drawing board.
Basically it's complicated, and funding should be set by the NIH and other boards who invest a lot of time learning about what's essential and what isn't. It shouldn't be a democratic process because then we'd end up spending half our money on "Does prayer heal?" and we'd all be smoking like chimneys wondering why we were dropping dead. I don't mean to sound elitist, I think most people are -capable- of learning enough to make good decisions on funding of stem cells, but they clearly haven't.
nearly 100 current treatments using stem cells, there is not a single one that uses embryonic stem cells. If this were better known, then all the resources being wasted on this dead-end research could perhaps be used more profitably.
Another point I should make: the public doesn't have the patience for research. Often times, I don't have the patience for my own research. But even though we've known about stem cells for what feels like a long time, it's important to realize that we've only known about stem cells for 10 years or so. That's an incredibly short time for a field to come to fuition. Penicillin took about 40 years from discovery to curing diseases on a wide scale if I remember correctly, and that was a heck of a lot simpler than stem cell biology. It is WAY too early to be saying "okay, ESC isn't going anywhere, it's time we drop it."
ESC has produced valuable things BTW. Most of what we know about stem cells, including adult stem cells, originates from studies on ESC, and we have a lot more to learn from ESC. That's why the research is going to continue even if we have managed finally to cure spinal cord injuries.
Well, I'd say RTFA, but it did seem to dance around that issue for no good reason...
It seems that it is in fact adult stem cells. They harvest them... possibly from your brain or spinal cord, I don't know.
As far as ethics go, I do have to point out that the adult stem cell field didn't start independently. A lot of what we know about adult stem cells we only know because we learned it first in embryonic stem cells. If this works, it's fruit of the ESC research tree. If you're not okay with ESC research but want treatments from it, you're still going to have to answer some ethical questions for yourself.
This ignores the fact that stem cells take their orders about what to become from their neighbors
I think that part alone is oversimplifying things, but what exactly ignores that? The growth factors listed in the patent are the same factors present in the niche where these stem cells are maintained, combinations of them keep the stem cells proliferating while they're expanding the isolated stem cells. The second patent, the chemicals which induce neuronal development, presumably do so through the same signaling pathways used by the microenvironment to direct neural stem cells to differentiate.
If you're implying that just dumping stem cells into a wound site in the CNS would be enough to patch the damage, you should know that there have been some trials testing that. They ended poorly for the mice. I believe some researchers in China tried it on human patients anyway, they developed teratomas and died quickly as I recall. Teratomas are the result of stem cells differentiating inefficiently. Even stem cells which have started to go down the neuronal path would have to be directed. For one thing, I'd worry that all the cells would turn into glial cells, no neurons. The CNS seems reluctant to add new neurons, wheras some glial cell populations get replentished.
I'd expect just dumping stem cells on the hole would be a little like trying to repair a hole in the side of a building by throwing wet concrete at it.
and from specialized cell groups called Fibroblasts.
Fibroblasts aren't cell groups, they are cells. A fibroblast is a cell. I don't believe they instruct neural stem cells though I could be wrong about that. Notch signaling: the neural stem cells appear to regulate their own populations. There are other factors, some that I'm not too familiar with, but I've never heard anything suggesting fibroblasts regulate neural stem cells, and they certainly aren't the only things regulating them. Fibroblasts definitely do not regulate all stem cells.
These structures would still be present in a person with Lou Garrig's disease (how ever you spell that.) since these structures form during ebryonic development in humans.
Fibroblasts are present in adults, but I disagree with the logic of "they should still be there since they were there in embryonic stages." You also have gills as an embryo. Those don't stay. Most of your neural stem cells also dissapear early in life.
Well see, we have this massive bureaucracy in the USA called the "Food and Drug Administration", whose job it is to kill people by impeding medical research.
I was going to say that cells have this massive "bureacracy" they call "normal cell biology" that makes nearly everything else look like a children's book, and that tends to slow down research. And there are other "bureacracies" like
-A complicated central nervous system
-Ethics
-Lack of resources
-Researchers need to sleep, eat, go to the bathroom, play videogames, etc
-The fact that no one really has figured out how to repair a central nervous system and we don't have a crystal ball that will tell us these things
that really bog down the process even further. I'd write a letter to God (all of them), whoever established rules of causality in our universe, whoever/whatever designed/caused us to evolve this way, and the first multicellular organism complaining. With all those bases covered, we're sure to get things changed so we can finally get somewhere fast with medical research.
Wonder how much the treatment will cost? How many kids don't get to eat at school so that someone gets this treatment.
This website estimates 700 billion dollars in direct costs, if we figure a school lunch costs somewhere in the neighborhood of 7 dollars (have no idea what the actual average cost would be,) that's about 100 billion lunches I guess. Somewhere in there.
Oh wait a minute, you said treatment, as in the spinal cord repair. I thought for a minute you were talking about the Iraq war, Mr. Center-right conservative. Sorry, my bad.
I have no idea how much the treatment will cost. Pocket change to us, but as I always say, a tax dollar spent on something besides bombing someone is a terrible waste of a dollar.
That's what I'm guessing too. TFA is ridiculously underinformative. Neuralstem doesn't seem to be talking specifics for some reason.
A video on their website was -slightly- more informative. They make lines of neural stem cells and inject them into the damaged part. That to me was somewhat questionable. Injecting undifferentiated, replicating cells into your central nervous system, even if they're neural stem cells sounds dangerous. You want the specific type of neuron there, and enough glial cells. Without directing their differentiation, I would expect you'd end up with a random mix of cells, or possibly a glioma.
It mentioned that these were patented methods. I don't know much about patents, but I did find this patent issued to neuralstem biopharmecuticals ltd (same company?).
The abstract to that patent:
What it actually seems to cover is nothing revoultionary. They isolate a neuronal stem cell, culture it in a wide variety of commonly used growth factors for 30 divisions, transfect the C myc gene, and then culture it in the same growth factors and/or whole serum. That's to make a line of cells. C-myc by the way was one of the transcription factors used to make induced pluripotent stem cells, and is associated with many cancers, which is worrisome. Nothing in that really suprises me. I'd be interested to hear from slashdot's armchair lawyers (or real lawyers) as to whether or not you can simply patent a combination of common techniques to make a line of stem cells.
What is more interesting to me is another patent that Neuralstem has, Use of fuse nicotinamides to promote neurogenesis.
The abstract for that one:
I'm less of an expert on this, it's a lot of biochemistry I'm not familiar with, but from the summary:
It seems they have a patent on compounds which have been shown to nudge stem cells towards making neurons. This might be their answer to the first problem I mentioned: not wanting to inject undifferentiated cells into your spine or brain.
I'm guessing their technique involves 1. Surgery to get tissue samples which would be enriched in neural stem cells (I've heard the cells next to the ventricles in your brain are good spots for that) 2. They take those cells and put them in their culture media that causes the stem cells to divide 3. They transfect c-myc to increase the yeild 4. They harvest the undifferentiated cells and incubate them with their differentiation compounds before or as they 5. Inject the mix into your damaged spinal cord.
If they moved on to humans, I'm guessing they've already demonstrated this works to a degree and doesn't cause a lot of cancers in mice or other animal models. The results on that are probably published, but I've wasted enough time here.
Had they told the U.S. about this system, however, the U.S. would have tried to plan around it. Think of this as an ace up their sleeve.
Just to be clear, that's the logic that was supposed to convince the soviets themselves to keep cool, the logic doesn't actually work as the Strangelove quote points out. The article mentions this specifically, that "It's a secret so they can't beat it" doesn't actually make any sense.
Say what you will about nuclear weapons but they are probably the only reason that humanity hasn't fought World War III yet.
High chance of a major war, or low chance of armageddon... both are bad, but that doesn't make latter option sane.
Prop 65. I can't help but think that had those same ideas come up in the legislature, lobbyists would have corrected it quickly (they sometimes do act in everyone's best interest). They would have pointed out that you shouldn't have to put that up on parking lots, because anyone eating oil, gas, antifreeze, or anything else in a parking garage, you're probably too messed up in the head to read a warning sign. They also would have pointed out that the thing would just benefit the lawyers.
As bad as our politicians are at making good laws, the voting public is often far worse.
Moderations are often strange and mysterious, but in this case they weren't exactly the same things. For one thing rather than just -speculating- that the researchers provided information as to how they paralyzed the rats, I provided the link. I also explained WHY it sometimes seems incomplete.
Not that it made my post on-topic and insightful as opposed to offtopic, just that may have been some of the odd thinking behind the moderations.