Stem Cells Mend Spinal Injuries 331
Darkman, Walkin Dude writes "New research shows that rats that had their spinal columns severed were able to regain use of their hind legs through the use of stem cells from embryonic rats." From the Wired article: "Spinal cord injuries can be caused by accidents or infections and affect 250,000 people a year in the United States alone, costing $4 billion annually, according to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders. Whittemore's team took specific cells from rat embryos called glial restricted precursor cells -- a kind of stem cell or master cell that gives rise to nerve cells."
We're not persuing this as fast as we can because? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:We're not persuing this as fast as we can becau (Score:5, Insightful)
Sounds like progress to me, (Score:1, Insightful)
It won't matter what you say, what you write or how professional you sound on the telephone, your congressmen and representatives don't give a shit what you have to say. They have a guaranteed vote from their freakishly religious base.. They appease them first, then maybe, maybe, if you're really lucky, will listen to whats on your mind.
What we need is a bulldozer to run over the children of every republican congressmen (at the state and federal levels,) not enough to kill them.. just force them into a fucking wheelchair, permanently. Then we'll see some opinions change.. until then, these scum sucking bastards will keep on promising their hardcore religious base that they'll protect america from the insidious & godless liberal infiltrators, fuck science, fuck progress, and fuck you america -> I'm getting elected again!
Re:We're not persuing this as fast as we can becau (Score:5, Insightful)
Wonderful, said organism is frozen and 99% likely never to see any functional life.
When it comes to human stem cells, that organism is another human life. It's a simple path from "We want the paraplegic to walk again" to "we will kill humans to allow others to walk again".
Do tell, Anonymous Coward, why is taking stem cells from a donated and otherwise perpetually frozen embryo equal to killing a human?
*shrug*. and people wonder why this country is going downhill
Obviously, because of MTV.
Re:We're not persuing this as fast as we can becau (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:We're not persuing this as fast as we can becau (Score:4, Insightful)
There's also a very valid concern about preventing trafficking in human tissue. Just as there are lots and lots of controls on organ harvesting and donations, there needs to be a way to prevent pregnancies simply for the sake of harvesting embryos to gain such tissue.
There are also a lot of concerns about ensuring this is actually a path with true possibility of results rather than a ghoulish battleground over the value of life and a macabe sideshow. Think of how the Nazi and Imperial Japanese performed experiments on living people. Where is the line drawn? It's a very serious issue.
Monstrously irresponsible snake-oil statements like that made by John Whatshisname (yeah, he was even "my" senator, shows how much he did for NC) that if John Kerry was elected President quadraplegics woudl stand up out of their wheelchairs and walk again are...shall we say...far less than responsible.
On the other hand, if the comments Senator Frist made are true that it is now evident that stem cells are not capable of endless regeneration and there are far fewer than the original 78 strains of stem cells available for federally funded research, perhaps allowing collection of stem cells from those which are left over from invitreo is a good idea.
Your post shows you don't really know much about this.
There is no restriction on private investment into stem cell research.
There are sources of human stem cells other than killing human embryos. Given the current belief that human embyonic stem cells cannot replicate indefinately, they are actually a poor source of the genetic material.
(Sidebar: there are very, very, very few human cells which can replicate endlessly. I don't remember the anem of the woman from whom one strain was harvested and is used for bio research. Virtually all cells have a limit to the number of tiems they can split.)
Prior to President Bush's plan of 4 years ago, there was no Federal funding for this research at all. A lot of what you would be seeing in the common media is not scientific, it's political.
Re:Sounds like progress to me, (Score:4, Insightful)
What kind of fucking maniac are you? Your publically advocating the maiming of innocent children for what you preceve as the sins of the parents. You should have your spine severed somewhere between your brain and your body....no wait, it's already happened for you to make such a hateful comment. I'm all for progress, better life through science, and all that bull shit. But give it a rest. You wanna maim the people that are voting and deciding this bull shit on the government level, fine, I'm all for that. It's people like you that give the freaks in the religious faction all the ammo they need to push forward with this shit. Mod this down if you like, But the parent post needs to be modded down too.
This brings up way too many political issues. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:We're not persuing this as fast as we can becau (Score:3, Insightful)
So the most unethical regime in the history of mankind (IMHO) created the best science, enhancing what we knew in hundreds of different fields, pushing everyone else to the limit. Remember, it was actually German scientists who won us World War 2.
Even though this technology does have the ability to be used misappropriately, one would have to admit to him or herself that doing so in a scientific field is not good for the country and for science over all. With tremendous strength, comes tremendous responsibility, and I think the United States has shown more than anything that they're too afraid of responsibility to develop the strength scientifically, but if it's got uses as a weapon, we'll go to no ends to improve it.
Perhaps the researchers should apply for weapons grants, stating that the technology they develop will be able to help countless soldiers on and off the battlefield, returning them to war quicker than ever before. That'd probably stur the couldron a bit.
I just think it's stupid that people like Christopher Reeves has to die because we won't condone the research nessicary to keep these people alive. I mean, they've already shown us that being paralysed does nothing against intellegence (Stephen Hawking), what better reason do we need to research something as dramatically lifechanging as giving someone who's paralysed the ability to walk again?
My entire arguement is that Politics shouldn't showboat science as it's bitch. Science needs to happen for the good of the human race, while politics does everything possible to stand in the human races' way. Let the damned scientists work.
Re:Anwser to flaimbait. No $$ for abortions... (Score:3, Insightful)
Except nobody would ever say that. That's what pisses me off so much about your side. What kind of freaking monsters do you imagine doctors to be? "If you get an abortion, you get a lollypop... Come on. Do it, do it, do it. Sissy." There are way more than enough people getting abortions already to satisfy any research needs. You're still going to be throwing most of them out even if you could use them for government funded research. If it turns out we need thousands of babies for actual treatments, we can have this talk, but what you're imagining is just not going to happen.
Re:We're not persuing this as fast as we can becau (Score:2, Insightful)
So why all the outcry about embryonic stem cell research? Why not go after the people who are wasting and killing all these embryos in the first place? The infertile people "playing god" and destroying embryos in the first place? They are endorsing killing embryos, as it is inherently part of the process of IVF. But yet the outcry is against the research on the remains of the IVF process... where is the logic in this?
Re:We're not persuing this as fast as we can becau (Score:5, Insightful)
It was largely agreed at the end of the second world war that the human experimentation that went on in NAZI germany was wrong. This is despite the numerous real medical advancements that were made as a result of such experimentation. Most reasonable individuals agreed that the societal cost performing compulsory experiments on essentially random members of society was greater than the benefit of the resulting medical knowledge.
It has since been agreed that, to some extent, animal experiment is okay as long as certain moral guidelines are followed. This is because cruelty toward animals has a dehumanizing effect on the human participant (as evidenced by the fact that most serial killers got their start with animals).
This puts us in a tricky situation when it comes to embryos and cloning. On the one hand, it is well established that an embryo is not the same as a person, on the other hand, an embryo has the potential the become a living, breathing member of society. So where do you draw the line? If experimentation on embryos is not human experimentation, is is certainly the cousin of human experimentation.
I'm not saying that the cost is not worth the benefit, I am only saying that there is a cost, and that we need to decide how far down the path toward human experimentation we can go before the costs outweigh the benefits.
Only in the bible belt or Teheran :-) (Score:4, Insightful)
I've never seen credible evidence that a person with a personality gets created before there is a working brain. Would love to be contradicted here with a few references to e.g. Nature? (-: Or even a few bible verses with claims that life start at conception...? :-)
I am, frankly, not holding my breath.
Now, someone might argue that a process is started at conception which would end up with a functioning human. The potential is critical. There are a few problems with that position:
- When a fertile woman smiles back at me (-: it has happened
:-), there is a potential for a new human
- Soon, all our cells will be potential humans with a little "twist"...
- Half of all conceptions ends soon with a spontaneous abortion. That means, according to the bible belt, that half of all people dies at an age of a few days. To be consistent, the believers should argue that half of all medical research should try to stop this mass death!
I could go on. (The potential argument is pathetically blurry and compare amateurs like Stalin and Hitler with tens of millions dying from spontaneous abortions... every year.)Your correct (IMHO) point is that given the assumption that life starts at conception, the rest of the religious people's position is logical. My point is that they are quite easily described as fuckwits with the same basis as "Son of Sam" had for his world view.
Re:We're not persuing this as fast as we can becau (Score:5, Insightful)
Because I have karma to burn...
The exact quote from John Edwards is, "If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going to get up out of that wheelchair and walk again."
I don't find anything particularly monstrously irresponsible about this quote. He doesn't imply that people will get up out of their wheelchairs a week or two after Kerry would have been elected. I think most people, like me, are smart enough to realize that curing spinal cord injury is a while coming.
However, personally, I'm convinced that if we put our collective ingenuity in medical research towards finding a cure for spinal cord injuries, we will get real and tangible results, as this article demonstrates. It's not a cure, but it sure is progress.
The election of John Kerry would not have necessarily accomplished this goal during his presidency, and I don't think that Edwards's quote was implying that it would. After all, John F. Kennedy said in 1961, "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth." Even if he had not been assassinated in 1963 and re-elected in 1964, his goal still wouldn't have happened while he was in office.
It is certain that the election of George W. Bush has hindered the goal of finding a cure to spinal cord injury. He has shut down a major source of funding in an area of research that, as we can see from this article, is directly relevant to finding a cure.
The really frustrating thing is the reason given for shutting down this funding—some misguided notion that an embryo is somehow morally equivalent to a human being. I find it interesting that most of these fundamentalists have no problem at all with killing highly complex organisms such as rats, monkeys, rabbits, and so on in the name of scientific research, but a clump of nondescript cells with no capacity for thought, feeling, or any sensation at all; a clump of nondescript cells with no past, present, or future; a clump of nondescript cells very similar to the kind that we wash off in the shower every day without even thinking; is somehow sacred.
What if these same fundamentalists had insisted that researching advanced rocket propulsion techniques in the '60's was too similar to building a Tower of Babel, attempting to reach to heaven? Would John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson have cowered to this weird religious-based belief and let the Russians unilaterally own space today?
I hope not, just as I hope that in the next election, we manage to get some leadership who is willing to stand up for science that can make our lives better instead of trying to push America further and further into a new dark age of technology because of religious fundamentalism.
Who is "they"? (Score:3, Insightful)
We take human life all the time. We take it when we have people work in extremely hazerdous conditions - like mining, or in the old days, building bridges. We take it when we decide we need a regime change. We take it when we allow the sale of tobacco products, or alcohol. We take it when we allow people to operate motor vehicles. WE take it when we revolt against an oppressive government.
As a society, we routinely accept the sacrifice of human life when we believe the benefits to society outweigh the sacrifice, and sometimes even if not.
It is simply not logical to be OK with sacrificing american lives and spending billions of american taxpayer dollars blowing thousands of living, breathing, thinking, feeling, walking-around Iraqi children to little bits to potentially improve Iraqi society and at the same time have a panic of conscience at the suggestion that millions of federal dollars be spent sacrificing a few hundred embryos smaller than a pinhead that are going to be discarded anyway to potentially provide medical relief to hundreds of thousands of American citizens.
Re:We're not persuing this as fast as we can becau (Score:4, Insightful)
> precious than the frozen embryo that never developed into a human?
The same thing that:
- makes _your_ life more precious than said fly
- made it precious when _you_ were a _human embryo_
Re:Anwser to flaimbait. No $$ for abortions... (Score:2, Insightful)
Actually, science is all about determining why just as much as how. Admittedly, how is usually the focus because until you really understand how, determining why is kind of tough.
All that Bush did was listen to his constituents, who said they don't want their tax dollars being spent on embryos that came from abortions.
Embryonic stem cells don't come from abortions. They've *NEVER* come from abortions. You stick your DNA into an egg cell, let it grow to a few hundred cells, and voila.
There'd be no point in getting stem cells from aborted fetuses, because those aren't *your* stem cells. They won't work in your body.
Bush just simply said that no government money will be spent on NEW embryos.
Which basically halts all government money for stem cell research. Those embryos will never do you or me a lick of good, because they're incompatible with both of us. Those were for *research*, not actual *use*.
Re:We're not persuing this as fast as we can becau (Score:2, Insightful)
To be or not to be...born? (Score:1, Insightful)
That's fine, as long as we don't yield to the temptation of taking shortcuts to our goal. That's the point about bringing up the Nazi's. They got results as another poster pointed out, but it was because they effectively took shortcuts, instead of say the harder path wich would have given results without so many ethical dilemas.
"The really frustrating thing is the reason given for shutting down this funding--some misguided notion that an embryo is somehow morally equivalent to a human being."
Can you prove otherwise, without using a lot of "maybe's" and "ifs"?
"I find it interesting that most of these fundamentalists have no problem at all with killing highly complex organisms such as rats, monkeys, rabbits, and so on in the name of scientific research"
We're talking human beings.
"but a clump of nondescript cells with no capacity for thought, feeling, or any sensation at all; a clump of nondescript cells with no past, present, or future"
Kind of hard to have a future in the present day environment, isn't it?
"a clump of nondescript cells very similar to the kind that we wash off in the shower every day without even thinking; is somehow sacred."
Hmmm, yes a "clump of cells" as long as it wasn't the "clump of cells" that turned out to be you. Strange how the "human" dividing line moves so.
Re:To be or not to be...born? (Score:5, Insightful)
If it was the clump of cells that would have turned out to be me, I promise you I wouldn't have minded at the time, and after that I wouldn't be in a position to be minding anything.
Re:We're not persuing this as fast as we can becau (Score:3, Insightful)
Interesting. Do you think that a human embryo is not human?
Is a human foetus human? How about a child? Or an adolescent?
What defines human for you?
Is it the presence of intelligence? In which case do you consider people less intelligent than yourself less human?
Re:To be or not to be...born? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure, no problem. A lot of people like to think that an embryo is morally a person, but in our practical day-to-day lives, no one really treats it as such. Ponder this:
These are just a few ways off the top of my head in which even conservatives do not treat an embryo or fetus as the moral equivalent of a human being. I'm sure if I put some more thought into it, I could come up with plenty more.
No, we're not. That's my point.
But the clump of cells wasn't me, therefore it's irrelevant. I keep seeing people confuse something's potential with it's reality. Just because something has the potential to be something else doesn't give it the status or rights of that thing it may someday become. As someone else pointed out, if my mom had had an abortion, it wouldn't make a lick of difference to me because I simply would have never existed. This is far, far different from my present life being ended by someone sneaking in and killing me in the middle of the night, because at this point, my existence isn't potential, it's reality.
Using your logic, one could just as easily say that if Osama bin Laden's mother had had an abortion, the world would arguably be a much happier and safer place, and because of this, women should have more abortions. It's a non sequitur and I reject such arguments. Let's make important decisions like this based on what what the reality of the situation is, not what it may or may not be someday or what it could or could not have been if something had been different.
Or framed in a different way, it's very possible in the near future that we'll be able to clone human beings from the intact DNA contained in any of the millions of cells in our bodies. At that point, should we start saving every sloughed off cell because the potential exists for it to be a person? Additionally, we probably have the technology now to freeze our extra cells to save them for the purpose of becoming new human beings when such technology does exist. Should we never let any of them go to waste now? Of course not, everyone knows that's silly. The same holds true for the clump of cells that is an embryo. Just because it has the potential to be a human being someday doesn't give it any special or sacred status today.
Re:We're not persuing this as fast as we can becau (Score:2, Insightful)
Much of this debate could be solved by once and for all agreeing that the mere fact that the research subject is human is not morally significant. Right now, many people are willing to grant a cell rights because less than 1% of its DNA is different from all other organisms save other humans. That's ridiculous.
A better approach is to ground the high moral consideration we give humans on their developed traits, such as self-consiousness, a capacity to suffer and enjoy, and a desire to live.
On this model, an animal would have some moral considerability (it can feel pain), but arguably not enough to enjoin medical experimentation that can improve human lives. And a clump of cells has zero moral worth.
This result matches many people's moral intuitions. All you have to do is give up the notion (originated in the same places that today's fundamentalists cite) that being a human makes you automatically special, from the moral point of view.
Re:We're not persuing this as fast as we can becau (Score:4, Insightful)
Most people would be against killing the latter for the benefit of others. The former? That isn't so clear, but in any case don't mix those togheter when discussing stem cell research.
Life doesn't 'start' at some point because it (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:We're not persuing this as fast as we can becau (Score:5, Insightful)
I find it interesting that most of these fundamentalists have no problem at all with killing highly complex organisms such as rats, monkeys, rabbits, and so on...
Heck, forget the monkeys--what about their bland willingness (or even outright blood lust) for killing non-christians? "Thou shalt not kill" isn't all that hard of a concept.
It doesn't say "thou shalt not kill people who look like you".
It doesn't say "Thou shalt not kill except for oil."
It doesn't even say "Thou shalt not kill unless they started it, in which case it's fine to open a little Whoop-ass on their sorry Is-le-amic butts."*
I wouldn't mind the fundementalists (of any flavour) nearly as much if they actually pratciced what they preached instead of running around like a bunch of anti-social nitwits, blowing up buses and abortion clinics and killing people--or voting to have somebody else's kids go kill them--in the name of their god.
--MarkusQ
* What it does say about "they started it" is "turn the other cheek."
Nothing to see here, move along (Score:2, Insightful)
Mice are different from humans and just connecting nerves don't work as you have to connect the right severed nerves together. Mice can't tell us how the "repair" feels is the movement just relex is it controlled?, it has been shown that a human can still walk if only 5% of his spinal cord still functions (which 5% i don't know?, but that don't mean he is not affected in other ways and functionality is severly impaired ). With nerve repair you could get a case of reflexes wired incorectly and constant spasm occuring or your soft touch nerve conected to the pain nerve channel causing extreme discomfort at the slightest touch. The grey matter of the spinal cord does alot of processing of nerve signals before it gets to the brain and how can this processing be programmed correctly?
Apparently salamanders can fully regrow lost limbs and their entire nervous system, this don't mean that humans can though.
in summary:
research = good
spinal injury = bad
mice!=men
Warning independant examinations have shown that upto 48% of what I say can be WRONG
Re:To be or not to be...born? (Score:1, Insightful)
Your future existance is potential. Potential is all you would lose if someone snuck up and killed you.
Re:More than one way to skin a cat. (Score:1, Insightful)
"Although many different kinds of multipotent stem cells have been identified, adult stem cells that could give rise to all cell and tissue types have not yet been found. Adult stem cells are often present in only minute quantities and can therefore be difficult to isolate and purify. There is also limited evidence that they may not have the same capacity to multiply as embryonic stem cells do. Finally, adult stem cells may contain more DNA abnormalities--caused by sunlight, toxins, and errors in making more DNA copies during the course of a lifetime."
Moreover, adult stem cells are being actively researched (not ignored as you seem to think). It's just that embryonic stem cells are far more promising at the moment.
You would not be so baffled if you had not been brainwashed by quack science websites like http://www.stemcellresearch.org/ [stemcellresearch.org].
Don't rush to judge (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Only in the bible belt or Teheran :-) (Score:3, Insightful)
LOL. Next time a fertile woman smiles at you but refuses to copulate, accuse her of murder!
Science does not answer *WHY*. It answers *HOW*. (Score:3, Insightful)
If you are asking Why do we exist or why does this happen, you are already assuming that god, or some omniscient, omnipotent creator exists and asking what their intent was.
Simple politics. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:We're not persuing this as fast as we can becau (Score:3, Insightful)
I am of the opinion, cold-hearted as this may sound, that until a fetus is capable of surviving without the 'life support' provided by the womb of the mother, it is not a human being, and is in the same category as a cancerous growth or tumor.
Let's face a fact, one that most men probably don't know, and probably alot of women, too: Having a baby is bad for your body.
It causes a depletion of calcium from the bones. Every child a woman has increases he risk of osteoporosis. A fetus sucks up other nutrients like crazy, too, which means that the 'host,' or 'mother,' if you prefer, has to eat a great deal more. Children are often compared to parasites, but that is exactly what a fetus is, in a most literal sense. It does nothing beneficial for its host (from a sexual selection standpoint -- children only count when they are able to reproduce), and causes a great deal of damage and stress to the host.
Also, looking at it from another way, in why I feel that there is nothing 'wrong' with destroying an embryo or fetus, I submit that killing something that is alive is 'wrong,' but that killing something that 'may become alive at some point' is not. It is only recently, in the past hundred years or so (in the 'developed' world) that infant mortality rates have become so low. Children often did, and in many places around the world, still do, die before they are born, via miscarriage and complications in birthing, among other things more exotic.
So, no, I really don't see anything 'wrong' with abortion or with destroying little buds of cells that haven't even had a good go at division. I don't feel a twinge of regret when I use listerine every morning, and I kill many orders of magnitude more living things when I do that than when an embryo is destroyed.
And no, I do not view this as being cold-hearted. I think other people view it as such, because the vast majority of people (like the 'Majority' of people who voted for King Bush II) are incapable of reason.