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Stem-Cell-Like Cells Produced From Skin
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Nov 20, 2007 05:03 PM
from the end-of-the-moral-debate dept.
from the end-of-the-moral-debate dept.
MikShapi writes "Skin cells can now be turned into something resembling stem cells. A genetic modification to four genes using a viral vector reverses differentiating, making the cells revert to a stem-cell state, capable for becoming any other cell in the body. The researchers are calling them 'iPS cells' or 'induced pluripotent stem cells.' In their experiments, iPS cells in the lab turned into nerve cells, heart muscle, and other tissues. The research was published in Cell and Nature by teams from the universities of Kyoto and Wisconsin. The article notes that if the new method proves successful, 'we can disconnect the whole stem cell debate from the culture war, from battles over embryo politics and abortion rights.' And, should this technique be adopted, stem cells will henceforth be abundant, easier and cheaper to come by for research and therapeutic purposes."
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Advance In Making Stem Cells From Skin 139 comments
KillerBob writes with an advance on the news from a year back that stem cells can be produced from human skin — discussed here. Now Canadian researchers have found a safe way to generate stem cells without using viruses to modify the genome, a process that can have its own dangers. "The ethical debate over embryonic stem cell use may soon be moot, thanks to a Canadian team of researchers who, together with a team out of Scotland, has found a safe way to grow stem cells from a patient's own skin. The revolutionary finding, described in a paper published yesterday by the international science journal Nature, means doctors may be one step closer to treating a multitude of diseases, including Alzheimer's, diabetes and Parkinson's."
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follow-up story... (Score:4, Funny)
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Informative? (Score:2)
It's a few years before they'll actually start shooting scientists.
As mentioned on Fark... (Score:5, Funny)
Futurama (Score:5, Funny)
Farnsworth: As a man it has become too much of a chore for me to clean out my wrinkles each day. Is it true that stem cells may fight the aging process?
Geneworks Woman: Well yes, in the same way an infant may fight Muhammed Ali! But -
Farnsworth: One pound of stem cells please.
Won't somebody think of the children? (Score:2)
The Wisconsin paper is not in Nature (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/1151526 [sciencemag.org]
Hope it works (Score:3, Informative)
This is Incredibly Exciting to me (Score:2, Insightful)
How will the skin get harvested? (Score:2)
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Nobody in their right mind would set up donation banks though. One of the best parts about being able to induce pluripotency is that you can use cells from the patient themselves, which means no rejection.
Viable (Score:5, Informative)
The issue people have with stem cell research is not stem cells per se, but that the harvesting of embryonic stem cells results in the destruction of a viable human.
Remember, religious people haven't had issues with adult stem cell research -- which this is. It's only embryonic stem cell research and SCNT processes which result in a viable human that people take ethical issues with.
If this can directly transform a skin cell into heart cells or whatever without moving through an "embryonic" state, then it's really the best of both worlds.
Re:Viable (Score:5, Informative)
Remember, religious people haven't had issues with adult stem cell research
It's always been false to blame "religious nuts" as being the only ones against harvesting embryonic stem cells. I'm an atheist, and I'm very uncomfortable with the idea of medical experiments on viable humans.
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You're certainly entitled to your opinion, but please be aware that, if you consider stem-cell embyros to be "viable humans", orders of magnitude more "viable humans" are destroyed by discarding excess IVF embryos and by abortion than have ever been used to produce stem cells.
Yes, that's true, but there is such a thing as dying with dignity. If an embryo is not going to be used, I'd rather see them destroyed in a dignified way than just say, "well, they ain't goin' anywhere, let's do some experiments! Y
Re:Viable (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Viable (Score:4, Insightful)
Your sense of dignity extends to even cells, but not to the animals or plants you consume every day. May I ask "Mr. atheist", what makes *your* cell superior to the cells present on animals and plants?
As an "atheist", you lose even the stupid argument of "coz the bible says so!"
Parent
It's not the end of the debate though. (Score:4, Interesting)
You'd think everybody is in favor of longevity, but one of Bush's early science advisers made it clear that he was opposed to life extension in principle and Bush explicitly backed him up on that. It blew me away, but they clearly were making the case in favor of death. Personally, I was shocked at this and I brought it up with some people in my family and I was even more surprised to find that a lot of the older people were sympathetic to the idea that death was something that shouldn't be messed with.
Personally, I say fuck that. Ya'll can be my witnesses, I want to live as long as freakin' possible and if I end up lookin' like Frankenstein carrying my head in the jar in the crook of my sewn on arm then all the better. Sounds good to me.
Some of the arguments in favor of death are kinda lame. I've heard the economic argument over and over. This is a popular one. It's like the economy would get all screwed up if people stopped dying on seventy year clocks because all the old geezer's saving would just accumulate insane interests until the oldest people had all the money. Okay, I can see that but this is not a good reason for people to die. Money aint that big a deal if we all had indefinite life spans. I'm sure we could calmly negotiate something once everyone had matured a few hundred years.
Another pro-death argument is the idea of overpopulation. I think I have a sweet answer to this one and this is what I really wanted to post about. See, the key is that you've got to have an answer that appeals to a really silly level of religious symbolism and I think I got it.
What you do is, you say that anybody who wants to extend their life past a certain age and have children will have to voluntarily exile themselves into orbit or the moon or some other place off the surface of the earth. This is the perfect solution. Why? Because, the result is that the people who accept eternal life can only do so if they . . . wait for it. . . go to heaven.
Is that sweet or what?
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Errr, no, that's not how retirement usually works. Look at it this way -- do the really old people in your community look like they're rolling in money? Warren Buffett will earn interest way in excess of his spending (and in excess of inflation) but your typical 150-year-old is unlikely to have enou
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As for overpopulation.. there's an (as good as) infinite am
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References, please? My google-fu isn't up to finding any such quote from Bush. I would expected such an explicit opposition to life to have generated quite a furor among the pro-life community...
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not to mention that while medicines have progressed considerably, no major disease seems to be completely curable without life-long medication.
Sadly this is due to the fact that very little research is done to find cures.
Some of course is done, mostly in research, hospital, and university levels, which is almost the longest point to a usable treatment one can get, but it is better than nothing.
Most if not every last pharma company has a negative value interest in finding cures. Cures cut into profit margins. Treating symptoms for the rest of a persons life is what they want, thus all they look into doing.
I'd hope that once the richest people ca
Someone is going to bash me but... (Score:2, Insightful)
The debate will never end (Score:3, Interesting)
One day (probably in the far distant future) the science-types will work out how to assemble (from scratch, no less) one (1) Hew-Man Being(patent-pending, tm, etc most likely) without the mess involved with "an embryo".
What you gonna do now?
You think this is insanely unlikely? (remember folks, people once thought it insanely unlikely the earth was NOT the center of the universe)
Until it's born, it's "an embryo". Of course essentially the same thing occurring as "just a bunch of separate organs" is (by definition) not "an embryo" although (in theory, so far) you could piece the jigsaw-puzzle together in "an assembl-O-mat" and produce a walking-talking fully-functional human.
And maybe we won't do it that way - maybe we'll just use full nano-assembley and build him (or her) one atom at a time.
At what point do you differentiate between "a human" (or "a person") and something that was literally designed and manufactured by "those geeks in Building C" you see in the cafeteria some days?
Do they deserve any rights? Rights the same as "the rest of us" or not? (anyone seen Blade Runner lately?)
Should "they" be any less worthy simply because we fully understand how they came to be, and can control that process?
Does anyone else in this room find it odd and unsettling that the very same people who are so against killing people before they're born are constantly requisitioning more funds from congress in order to kill people after they've been born? (well, very long after. And "those people" aren't "my people" so that makes it fair and just, doesn't it?)
Re:The science! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:The science! (Score:5, Insightful)
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In my view, the scientifically deficient position is that life has a beginning.
The concept of being alive is a vaguely defined multi-dimensional continuum. Some things are more alive and some things are less alive. Some things
Re:The science! (Score:4, Insightful)
Think of it this way. The government wants to do X. X in itself is not that bad, but it is a minor version of Y, which is totally unacceptable. X can lead to Y if you are not careful. Do you allow X?
Now let's say X is limited wire tapping of international phone calls without a warrant and Y is a police state. Do you allow X?
Now the way I see it is this. X is experimenting with human embryos. Y is experimenting with fully formed humans. Do you allow X?
If you did not provide the same answer for both, can you explain why?
Parent
Re:The science! (Score:5, Insightful)
And then it diverts attention from all those acts by crating fake controversies, over imaginary "murders" of "living cells".
How *do* you define life then? It might be fine to just ban the abortion of a unborn fetus older than 2 months. There are tons of medical reasons to support that decision. But if you want to push the line even further, where does it stop? A ban on the morning after pill? A ban on condoms, since they interfere with "potential" life and thus "murder" it as well? A ban on masturbation perhaps, since it is also wasting potential "life"? How *do* you define life? What makes one kind of cell(fertilized egg) "alive" and yet other(sperm) is not, when neither is showing any greater sentience than the other at the early stages at least? If you make a criterion, what is the "rationale" behind that criterion?
And how soon before we get people being persecuted for masturbating, or using protection during sex? What is the guarantee that this lunacy will not lead to *THAT*? Historical evidence shows that when we put "government" in charge of personal decisions, and allow them too much power, *that* is when "experimentation on humans" happen. Care to give one example of a reasonably democratic country where human experimentation was tolerated? I can definitely give examples of fascist, police states, where the human experimentation happened and was ignored by citizens. And a government making insane, illogical laws that are just a step way for interfering with personal decisions of people, is more likely to lead to a fascist, police state.
And if "life" is so holy, what is the arrogant reasoning behind killing and eating other "near-sentient" lifeforms? By your logic everyone should be forced to become vegetarian? Oh wait! Even plants have been proven to be alive! So, it is the arrogant belief that only human beings are "truly" alive, right?
But that is a very Christian belief, isn't it? i.e. humans being the only "really" alive beings! As a matter of fact Jain and Buddhist religion consider even lower life forms to be just as alive and forbid killing them because of the desire avoid the very same arrogant hypocrisy. So basically the American Government is just enforcing a "Christian" belief, while paying lip service to the idea of being secular, "religious equality" and "separation of state and the church".
Parent
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No hard feeling?:P
Um. No. Totopotent vs. pluripotent. (Score:5, Insightful)
The answer is, we don't have an answer. We haven't done the leg work to find out what the range of use is on embryonic stem cells. This debate has nothing to do with ethics. No medical ethics are violated here, the debate is 100% about religion. The fact is, if one actually worried about the embryo, scientists would be happy to make lines by taking some cells from a developing embryo, then make a stem cell line out of those and implant the embryo and get an infant out of the deal. So rather than some embryo which would otherwise be medical waste, we would have a stem cell line and a child. Who could object? -- Um, religious folks; they still object.
It could very well be that ASCs are all we need and that we could dedifferentiate them easily with full usability, able to make everything from a new kidney to an embryo and a clone army. The problem however, is we just don't know because the research isn't there. The idea that a clump of 150 cells without any nerves at all is the ethical equivalent to a child, or that that clump of cells is more valued than somebody with a spinal cord injury whose treatments are being prolonged is a joke. A fly has 100,000 nerve cells and is by far the ethical superior of swaths of embryos.
Embryonic stem cells might not be any more useful. And we'll always have that "might" there until we do the research.
There's nothing about medical ethics which suggests some kind of soul thing jumps into a zygote at the moment the gametes join, and nothing to suggest that a couple cells aren't just that, some cells. If you read this story you must realize that there is no more ethics problems with ESCs then there is with scratching my ass. In fact, I'm bound to scratch away swaths more cells with the ass-scratch. Ethics? No. This is about religion and the unevidenced nonsense it advocates for no reason in particular. This research is useful, but it doesn't answer the actual questions we need answered.
Parent
Re:The science! (Score:4, Insightful)
I wonder, if we hadn't been objecting, would anybody have attempted to find this alternative, or would researchers have considered the embryonic method good enough?
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stem cell researchers were using cells from unused IVF samples, not killing babies as you people like to compare it to. I can't even begin to understand how you could equate a couple of cells in a petree dish to a human.
And no, this line of research would still have been pursured without your stupid agenda, because it solves other
Re:The science! (Score:5, Interesting)
And that is where we disagree. And I'm sure you can understand this line of thought even if you don't agree with it. It goes to the question of what is a human deserving of human rights. We consider it a unique being with DNA, post-fertilization.
We find this definition has a scientific and ethical clearity that can avoid a lot of the horrors of history that now (most of) humanity regrets based on what counts as a human worthy of protection.
We've found your previous and current standards of tribe/religion/family/ethnicity/sexuality/age/disability/ or simply 'might makes right' distinctions to be unworthy of our species.
So you disagree - so if we are not persuasive, are we at least not 'stupid?'
you don't get to claim this is some kind of victory
To quote Jerry Sienfeld's response when he was told he was not in listed in the top 10 of comedians in the history of America but was instead number twelve, I'll take it.
Parent
Re:The science! (Score:5, Insightful)
At what age does a human/zygote make the cut so that it is no longer available for scientific research? Two months? Six months? Birth? Five years? When they are potty trained? What classifies a human as a human deserving human rights? What test must be passed before that clump of cells is human? Who are you to decide? What if the government decided the age of liberty was your age +1? How would that make you feel?
Parent
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To demonstrated, let me extend your hysterical little list with one more: what makes conception special?
Now, to demonstrate I am not an idiot, I will actually discuss this question rather than stupidly spewing forth an endless series of minor variations on it.
Genetic uniqueness is not required to make a human human. On the one hand we have identical twins, who are unique indivi
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We certainly can't do it now, but is there any real doubt that this will be a possibility in the future?
Of course, we still need to answer some questions: what are rights? who(what?) gets them, and why?
Once we really have the answers to those questions, all this controversy will sort itself out.
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Ad hominems directed toward the parent aside, you misunderstand the argument one might make in respect of conception as the beginning of life, and have clouded the water with only marginally related (although interesting) questions regarding cloning and such.
Conception as the beginning of life follows a line of thinking something like this:
1) The zygote/embryo/fetus is a human thing. (of course, so is your arm or kidney)
2) This thing is not non-living, so it is a living thing. (whether it is independent
Humanity (Score:4, Insightful)
This is an appeal to emotion. Which happens to be a logical fallacy when it comes to argumentation.
It seems to me that sentience should be the test. At some point in the not too distant future we will create sentient beings that are machine based. This is inevitable. They will have no DNA at all. Using the typical arguments that you seem to embrace, such being should not be afforded the same human rights that you and I have even though they may be thousands of times more intelligent than we are.
Perhaps we should be asking ourselves, what makes us human? I don't think relying on a purely biological answer is very wise or useful.
Parent
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I would guess it more likely that the breakthrough will be held back by people who don't want their skin to turn to stem cells before their eyes because of some virus escaped from the research labs.
Then again, someone's probably already claimed movie rights on t
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Re:This won't stop them turning it into an issue.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:This won't stop them turning it into an issue.. (Score:2, Interesting)
i mean after all wtf is wrong with playing god? if we listened to these whacko's we'd still be praying on our needs in a dirt hut.
If i was a rich billionaire i'd pump shit tins of money into stem cell research and have them make me some kind of catdog style animal.
Wow! That's not only a troll, but 100% Grade-A Certified Organic FUD!
Conserva
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This is really a questionable statement. People had been getting grant money to do embryonic stem research well before Bush became president. He became the first to create a specific category of NIH funding towards stem cell research, but that was with the major caveat that you could only use existing stem cell lines which in effect froze embryonic stem cell research in the US and set it back 5 years. It's akin to setti
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Word games. That sounds all well and good, but ignores reality. You see, organized religion (which is what we all mean when we say "religion" hereabouts, it does not refer to some unique personal profession of faith) is all about people, not God. In the end, if it turns out that God is just another of Man's less useful inventions, even that caveat will go away.
More to the point,
Re:Embryonic Stem Cells - not a threat (Score:4, Insightful)
The only cogent logical argument for definition of life other than "life begins at conception" that I've heard is that the definition of life should be the opposite of the definition of death as it is currently defined. No heartbeat, brain waves, etc. In other words, when you can't medically define a mass of cells that will eventually develop into a human as "dead," then it's a human life.
If there's any other logical definition, please let me know. Otherwise, the definition of what is human life really is just an emotional plea to support whatever you want to advocate. But "it doesn't even look like a baby!" isn't a rock-solid basis on which to form an ethical argument.
And certainly the potential of the mass of cells has to be considered. If you were in a coma on life-support with little or no brain function, but we were 99% certain that in nine months you'd recover completely, could you justify pulling the plug on the machines keeping you alive?
If not, how do you ethically justify doing the same thing to that mass of cells?
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