Stem Cells Restore Feeling In Paraplegic 540
Vicissidude writes "According to WorldNetDaily scientists in Korea report using umbilical cord blood stem cells to restore feeling and mobility to a spinal-cord injury patient. The research, published in the peer-reviewed journal Cytotherapy, centered on a woman who had been a paraplegic 19 years due to an accident. After an infusion of umbilical cord blood stem cells, stunning results were recorded: 'The patient could move her hips and feel her hip skin on day 15 after transplantation. On day 25 after transplantation her feet responded to stimulation.'"
Umbilical Cord Stem Cells? (Score:3, Interesting)
How to fix the real stem cell problem (Score:1, Interesting)
This news, if true and long lasting, is great.
In the short and long run, this topic is so political that even my brain runs in circles.
The first problem is the stem cell source. Umbilical cords get around the fetal tissue issue, but that problem will surface until the abortion issue is settled. Aabortion is an "is it murder?" issue. The definition of murder, Constitutionally, is a State right. Federally, the only Constitutional crimes are treason, piracy and counterfeiting. So stem cells are not in the federal domain of control.
Second is funding. Our Congress has no power Constitutionally to fund science. Medical research thrives on competition; in fact there are almost no medical discoveries that can be associated with federal studies. Let different companies compete and more people will be helped or saved.
Thirdly, regulations set up by the FDA on drugs pending approval are holding back many drugs that can help in stem cell use. The FDA is unconstitutional and costs tens of thousands of lives annually in delays. I'd rather leave drug testing and acceptance to UL-like private companies. When drugs go bad, lawsuits control the companies. The FDA has helped no one and prevented no one's death.
We have the free market to thank for so many medical discoveries. Why should we burden new ones with bureaucracy?
Extremely sceptical (Score:2, Interesting)
It won't (Score:2, Interesting)
They're umbilical cord blood stem cells (Score:5, Interesting)
<SNIP>
I have known about this for some time, but because I didn't want to be guilty of the same hyping that is so often engaged in by some therapeutic cloning proponents, I waited until it was published in a peer reviewed journal. Now it has been and the news is HUGE: Korean scientists have used umbilical cord blood stem cells to restore feeling and mobility to a spinal cord injury patient. I have no link, but I do have the report published in Cytotherapy, (2005) Vol 7. No. 4, 368-373.
The patient is a woman who has been paraplegic from an accident for more than 19 years. (Complete paraplegia of the 10th thoracic vertebra.) She had surgery and also an infusion of umbilical cord blood stem cells. Note the stunning benefits: "The patient could move her hips and feel her hip skin on day 15 after transplantation. On day 25 after transplantation her feet responded to stimulation. On post operative day (POD) 7, motor activity was noticed and improved gradually in her lumbar paravertebral and hip muscles. She could maintain an upright position by herself on POD 13. From POD 15 she began to elevate both lower legs about 1 cm, and hip flexor muscle activity gradually improved until POD 41." It goes on from there in very technical language.
The bottom line is this, from the Abtract: Not only did the patient regain feeling, but "41 days after [stem cell] transplantation" testing "also showed regeneration of the spinal cord at the injured cite" and below it. "Therefore, it is suggested that UCB multipotent stem cell transplantation could be a good treatment method for SPI patients." (My emphasis.)
We have to be cautious. One patient does not a treatment make. Also, the authors note that the lamenectomy the patient received might have offered some benefit. But still, this is a wonderful story that offers tremendous hope for paralyzed patients. Typically, it has been extensively ignored in the American media (although it has gotten some foreign press attention). (Can you imagine the headlines if the cells used had been embryonic?)
One last point. This is a patient with a very old injury--making the results even more dramatic.
Onward!
</SNIP>
For those who missed the reference, it's
Cytotherapy, (2005) Vol 7. No. 4, 368-373.
Re:Umbilical Cord Stem Cells? (Score:2, Interesting)
Question for bio-geeks (Score:3, Interesting)
South Korea (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Question for bio-geeks (Score:4, Interesting)
They've cut mice in half and done this, and while their back half screws around for a bit, it's really not very long until their motion is completely back to normal.
BEEP BEEP BEEP Goes the Bullsh*t Detector (Score:2, Interesting)
So yet again, what the hell do the Slashdot "editors" actually do other than randomly his "yes" or "no" without any fact checking?
MOD THIS THE HELL UP (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Well... (Score:3, Interesting)
Obviously, I'd benefit from an introductory college course in ethics, but this being Slashdot, I'll ask anyway. Is there a good reference online that describes "Ethics" (capital E) in a fairly general manner, such that the basic axioms like "the ends justify the means" are refuted in a logical and consistent manner? Is there a good book I should be reading on Ethics? Self-study is important to me, and I'd hate to re-hash well known arguments in a debate with someone more knowledgable than I. Appearing stupid or uneducated online is sort of par for the course, but I'd prefer to avoid looking stupid.
Re:Well... (Score:5, Interesting)
OK, I'll play, but only because I'm curious. What is the ethical problem with using embryonic stem cells from fertalized eggs that are being thrown away from a fertility clinic? They are other wise going to be thrown away or disposed of, so why not put them to use?
What I get confused with is how people are against that particular use, yet aren't against the fertility clinic itself, which outside the scope of this argument is throwing away fertalized eggs...aka "murder" to the extremists.
Now granted, there are plenty of other ways to use embryonic stem cells as well, but weve completely killed on good use but claiming all uses are bad.
Here come the Stem Cell tirades (Score:5, Interesting)
Stem cell research is a boon to medical science. Umbilical stem cells, which in no way hurts anyone (and which only a few outsider whacko groups are against), have proved invaluable to health care research. Embryonic stem cells (the ethical problem) are even more invaluable.
Here is the problem. As an individual, I support the legality of abortion. I don't like the fact that it's necessary at times, and I'd be glad to see it discouraged in any positive way possible. I can respect those who come to the painful realiziation that they simply cannot support a child due to serious personal issues (be it drug abuse, abject poverty, mental illness, etc). And conversely I have absolutely zero respect for those who terminate simply because it wouldn't suit their lifestyle. One is little different from an animal reabsorbing their fetus under stress, and the other is not far from infanticide out of convenience. And while I do not consider an embryo or even a fetus to be a "baby", I don't consider them mere biological byproducts of sex either.
In a limited, controlled, publicly accountable fashion, I can easily accept open stem cell research. Let's not beat around the bush - whatever the origin, you're destroying a human embryo for medical and research gain. When that embryo is the castoff from fertility work (ie spare embryos that had a chance but will never be complete), it's not so bad. But there's just something questionable about creating a human life simply to dismantle it.
I don't consider abortion infanticide unless it's late term (ie the fetus could actually survive with a little medical assistance). It's not an independant being yet, and it's by no means an infant until it can at least breathe without a machine (not counting injury/deformity). But in at least a limited way, once a fertilized ovum undergoes it's first cell division (not at fertilization, as it hasn't become a new entity yet), it has become a new human in every sense that a fetus or a toddler is. To say it's anything less is no different from saying that a baby or a retarded person is less human than you are. I'm not even talking about souls or religion - I have grave doubts about both subjects. To me, it's just the most logical conclusion.
So... while I applaud the wonders we can perform with placental and umbilical stem cells, and would like to see that research continue at full speed, I can more than understand why some people don't like seeing their tax dollars go to embryonic stem cell research. I personally don't care for the idea of creating human organisms, concious or not, simply for the gain of others.
Re:Benefit of the doubt (Score:3, Interesting)
Not that stems cells haven't already accomplished incredible things, mind you. But this whole situation is a bit... odd.
Re:And what did it take.... (Score:3, Interesting)
[ The words "cord" and "blood" might be useful clues. ]
As to the taking of cord blood "killing who knows how many babies", well, I'm stumped there, never heard of even one death and can't see how it could happen - care to provide a reference ?
Or perhaps you just don't have the faintest clue about obstetrics ? [ not a good starting point if you want your criticism / anger to be taken even slightly seriously ]
Re:Question for bio-geeks (Score:3, Interesting)
(It amazes me how amazing the brain is at some things but how sucky it is at others, like keeping things in short term memory.)
Re:Question for bio-geeks (Score:2, Interesting)
Totally non-scientific explanation, but consider this: how does your finger know to grow into a finger? How does your skin know to reseal itself after it is cut. It does happen and there is an algorithm for it encoded in your DNA, but it is not exactly obvious exactly how it works.
For that matter, one thing I always wonder is how does your face know to take the form it does and how does it manage to retain its shape and features over an entire lifetime? They say all the cells in your body are replaced every 7 years. It is just amazing to me that the body continues to remember the shape those cells need to be in from the very microscopic all the way up to the macroscopic facial features that you have. I've never really read a good explanation for this.
Re:Well... (Score:3, Interesting)
Problem is that they aren't (all) - therefore your whole basis is incorrect. Probability of discovering miscarriage of justice in timeframe of typical life sentence is far from negligible (based on experience to date).
If embryo cells are taken at scheduled destruction date (eg. if can only be kept for limited time by law), probability of any other result is nil.
What is the ethical problem with using said prisoners in medical research when they are going be die anyways? They are otherwise going to be executed anyways.
Prisoners are used in medical research.
Re:Question for bio-geeks (Score:1, Interesting)
"She eventually became paraplegic and was dependent on the use of an electromotive wheel chair for 19 years and 6 months before treatment with MSC.
[...]
Deep tendon reflex of both knees and ankles was decreased. [...] The extent of neural injury according to the standard of the ASIA (AQmerican Spinal Injury Association) was complete paraplegia of the 10th thoracic vertebra."
They injected 1 ml of cord blood stem cells (10^6 cells) into the subarachnoid space of the normal spinal cord. Then 2 ml more (another 10^6 cells) were injected "diffusely" into the intradural and extradural space of the injured spinal cord (inside and outside). All reported recovery appears to have occurred within 41 days of treatment.
In judging the procedure, it's hard to know how much recovery she might have had simply from a 20-year-post-trauma laminectomy (removing the pressure on the dislocated part of her spine). I'm no doctor, but I'd guess the typical response is substantially less than what was observed.
Finally, here are some reasons why the article might have appeared in Cytotherapy and not a big name journal like Lancet/NEJM/etc:
1) It's a new periodical (Jan 2005) and a major scoop would put it on the map.
2) It might have a much faster time to press than most periodicals.
3) It might require little or no peer review...
Randy
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Umbilical Cord Stem Cells? (Score:2, Interesting)
Wait, I forgot. It's okay if God kills them. We shouldn't work to save the hundreds of millions of 'babies' that die that way each year. Just the few hundred thousand who die in fertility clinics.
Wait, no, the pro-lifers apparently don't even care about them. Maybe they don't think life starts at conception after all.
Wait, unless we're talking about the morning-after pill. Which is so evil it still hasn't managed to get FDA approval after a damn decade, despite being as safe as birth control pills.
I wish pro-lifers would pick a damn story and stick with it. If life starts at conception, surely a family who spends time and money to make six 'babies'. have one die after two days in the womb, give birth to another, and kill four is much worse than a woman who gets an abortion.
If you pro-lifers think that's not comparable, it's because you realize that 100 cells is not a 'person'.
But right now dead 'babies' appears to be okay if 'God' or rich people do it, but not okay if poor or unmarried people do it.
This thread is unbelievably ironic (Score:4, Interesting)
But No! The whole thing turns into a thread revolving around the technicalities of federal funding of stem cell research. Mainly, why this should be another reason for you to hate George Bush. Which, if you RTFA, this category of research is not affected by the embryonic stem cell funding ban.
This reminds me of the threads where there's some new energy technology breakthrough and the whole thread is spent trying to find a reason why it has to be bad for the environment. If the thread involves anything remotely related to nuclear energy forget about it.
It seems that for some topics there is such a huge amount of misinformation about the subject, especially political hot potatos, that the whole thread has to be spent educating people.
When the thread comes up again, with the same issue, a whole new wave of the uneducated arrives and it starts all over again. This same thing has happed every time stem cells come up, it seems to happen even more on threads where the discovery did not use actual embryonic stem cells.
Re:Well... (Score:5, Interesting)
Embryos being disposed of and prisoners who are given life terms being killed early are two very, very different things.
The main argument trumpeted by people against embryonic stem cell research is that embryos are worthy of "being saved," which is to say, they have "moral value." These same people, to be consistent, have to be against forms of very early abortion and even some forms (if not all forms) of contraception.
The basic thing that vexes these people is that they have never studied the potentiality principal. They think the mere fact that an embryo has the potential to become a human being gives it moral value, makes it "worthy of being saved." This is because they know human beings have moral value, and so conflate "a thing with potential to be something of moral value" with "a thing that has moral value." However, this argument is spurious, as I'll try to show.
For one thing, many things have the potential (i.e., have some causal relationship) to the creation of a healthy infant child. As someone else once suggested to me, one such thing is a glance of flirtation toward a fertile young woman. From that glance, there exists the potential for intercourse; from that intercourse, the potential of conception; from that conception, the potential of a human child in the form of an embryo.
If that example seems too cooked up, think about miscarriages. Hundreds of thousands of "babies" die from miscarriages every year. So, since that constitutes an essential mass death of a significant portion of the human "population," shouldn't we be devoting massive scientific research dollars to stopping miscarriages?
The reason both these things seem absurd is because saying that embryos have moral value is completely arbitrary. Harm cannot be done to embryos in the same way harm cannot be done to chairs or rocks. The chair or rock doesn't have a hope, an aspiration, or a direction which is thwarted by the said harm. The rock or chair doesn't care about the said harm. The crux of the matter is, the rock or chair isn't conscious, and that's why they have no moral value.
The only people who might care about the rock or chair's harm is the owner of the said rock or chair. But that is only due to a relational property between the owner and his objects, and hasn't a thing to do with morality. (For example, when considering whether humans have the right to harm other humans, it serves no one to say, "Okay, but what if the person harmed were your mother?" Introducing the familial relationship simply distorts the inherent morality of a thing, since it makes the decision relational, based on other notions such as loyalty to one's family, etc.)
The reason we see harms to dogs or cows as worse than harms to chairs is because we know that dogs or cows can a) experience pain, b) in dying or being severely harmed, be deprived of their right to continue the life they were already living. Chairs experience no pain, conceive of no harm, and have no life of which to be deprived.
One can make an argument for defending the late-term fetus (which may be conscious) from abortion, but preventing the embryo from use in scientific research based on the idea that the embryo is a "human life" is, morally speaking, quite unsound. This is because embryos have no moral value of their own. They are things which may, one day, become things of moral value, but that does not mean they are morally valuable now.
To take to your prisoner example, human beings have moral value even if they are savage criminals sentenced to life imprisonment. This is because they are conscious human beings who still have a right to life within our moral framework. Using them from scientific research sets a moral example that humans, in general, are usable in har
No two ways about it: donors decide (Score:2, Interesting)
If the donors want the blastocyst to go for research instead of down the drain, the government should not gain-say the decision with funding restrictions. If we allow research money for autopsies, cultures and other research on the bodies of babies, restricting it for embryonic cell research because it's "immoral" holds born children as LESS human than those small balls of cells.
"Morality" bans on fetal stem-cell research amount to saying "it's a human being... until it's born". My contempt for people who hold this POV knows no bounds.
Re:Well... (Score:3, Interesting)
THAT's the issue. Once it becomes legal to create human beings to kill them the society has legalized ghouls.
Of course, you can do the same thing that is done to prevent trade in human organs: make the sale (and purchase) of sperm, ova, and embryos illegal.
Embryos can be donated for medical research, or to other couples, or disposed of--whatever is fine by the ethical lights of the parents.
Researchers can't get grants and can't publish their work if they aren't able to describe where their samples come from; they would go to jail if they report that they paid for materials. Without a cash incentive for fertility clinics or couples to generate excess embryos beyond what would be used for fertility treatments, you avoid the creation of embryos solely for the purpose of research.
Re:Well... (Score:4, Interesting)
Which would be a great argument if you were debating with a rational, scientific person. However, most of the objections come from people who have a religious orientation and some level of belief about association of a "soul" to the embryo (potential child). Miscarriage (many of which happen before the pregnancy is even evident) is a "natural" event and therefore within the realm of God. As in, you might not like it, but it's in God's plan and so it is acceptable. Deliberately creating and harvesting the embryos is not natural and not God endorsed.
(Disclaimer: These are not my beliefs, I am just illustrating that people who are anti stem cell research are not usually coming from a scientific perspective.)
Re:MOD THIS THE HELL UP (Score:1, Interesting)
By the way, your confrontational attitude makes you look like a half-wit.
Re:Here come the Stem Cell tirades (Score:4, Interesting)
Way to gloss over a huge distinction. A person deserves our protection; a "human animal" doesn't necessarily. A baby born without a brain is a human animal, and so is a braindead accident victim who will never recover. Neither one is a person, and we shouldn't have any ethical concerns about euthanizing either (as long as we're sure they'll never recover).
But when you allow stem cells to divide and subdivide, each cluster or even individual cell is in itself a biologically viable entity that, given a suitable place to go, would gestate into a human.
As long as that "suitable place to go" is a womb, or an environment carefully set up to mimic a womb, with all the right nutrients. Hell, you could say a single sperm is a biologically viable entity that, given a suitable place to go (an egg), can gestate into a human. That doesn't mean every sperm is sacred.
Re:Well... (Score:3, Interesting)
This is not an ethical problem (Score:3, Interesting)
If this premise were correct (i.e. that they think this) then your argument would be fine. But it is not correct. Regardless of any rhetoric they use, their basic belief is not an ethical one, but a religious one: i.e. that what is 'worth saving' is any living soul, and that the soul enters the physical body at conception and leaves it on death.
Ethically, their side and your side are in agreement, that is you both agree that a human life has moral value, but they define a human life as being a living soul, and you define it as being a conscious human entity. There is no ethical disagreement here.
The disagreement is at best metaphysical, but more likely it is theological. In other words, if you want to change their views, you have to change their view of what a human life is, and to do that would require changing their religious belief, not their ethical arguments, or even their definition of what it is to be conscious (because consciousness does not enter into it for them).
As someone who has studied plenty of philosophy, I would say this is a perfect example of why ethical philosophy is quite useless. Rational argument can persuade people that there are inconsistencies in their ethical, religious, or other beliefs, and it can persuade them that if they want a certain thing, then they should do such and such a thing to get it, or then they must logically want another thing, but it cannot persuade people that they should want this or that to begin with.
In this case, the real question at issue is whether there is a soul, etc--and while philosophy can make plenty of arguments about nonduality and so forth, religion has the power to persuade people to abandon all rationality, even the law of noncontradiction if need be. Especially Americans.
Re:Well... (Score:3, Interesting)
It's because it becomes a moral question. God gave us the intellect to build nuclear weapons as well. God gave man the capacity to viciousness that can lead to the murder of millions. The point is that mankind is supposed to act morally.
The question is simply: is harvesting embryos morally correct by God's law.
Somehow I don't think there is a passage in the bible that states the correct answer bluntly (although I'm sure there are whackos out there who would consider the murder of innoncents to be descriptive). However because an embryo is a "potential child", killing the embryo is killing the potentiality with human hands - rather than by an unavoidable "natural" act. So the same argument applied against abortion is applied here.
Now you imply that no one complains about the excess eggs in a fertility clinic. A quick search on google shows things like a bill in Kentucky [sayanythingblog.com] that makes it illegal to fertilize more than one egg for IVF. Or the findings that there are 400,00 0 frozen embryos in storage [futurepundit.com], partially because the parents have moral qualms about getting rid of fertilized eggs they don't need. It seems like no one thought about it too much before the stem cell issue came up, but I would expect to see legislation passed in some states which will make IVF more difficult.
I'm playing devil's advocate here - as these aren't my personal opinions.