Stem Cell Targeting Wins First Nobel of 2007

An anonymous reader writes "'Gene targeting,' which allows scientists to isolate stem cells in mice and reproduce genetically modified offspring, has won the Nobel Prize for medicine. Having allowed pathologists to better understand diseases such as cancer, heart disease, diabetes and cystic fibrosis for close to 20 years, the technology is just now getting its big day in the sun. From Nobel's full how-it-works: 'Their [i.e. ES cells] use as a vehicle for the transfer into the mouse genome of mutant alleles, either selected in cell culture or inserted into the cells via transformation with specific DNA fragments, has been presented as an attractive proposition. In many of these studies the use of pluripotential cells directly isolated from the embryos under study should have great advantages.'"

Re:"isolated from the embryo"

[moderatorrater]

It's a mouse, so neither. also, it sounds like they were harvesting cells using a non-destructive method, so the embryo survived after harvesting a few cells from them.

It's far more than stem cell harvesting

[mcg1969]

Harvesting of embryonic stem cells constitutes only a small part of the process. The stem cells undergo genetic processing and are then injected into other embryos (blastocysts), which are implanted into a mother and grow into chimeras. When the chimeras reproduce some of their offspring contain only genetic material from the affected stem cells. THAT is the end result that they are looking for. I really don't think this process is likely to ever be performed on humans, so the ethical issues of human stem cells are irrelevant.

Re:Glad the US govt has supoorted stem cell resear

[ArcherB]

Good thing we don't need the government to fund something to make progress on it.

Actually, the US government DOES support this type of research. This was done with mice, not human embryos. Still, even it was human tissue being researched, the US Gov't would still fund research providing that it either used one of the existing stem cell lines or the stem cells came from a different source such as cord blood or adult stem cells.

You should really look this stuff up before you spout off like that.