1414195
story
roman_mir writes
"Wired reports that a 16 year old teenager had a hole in his heart (a nail gun accident,) which was repaired by injecting stem cells directly into his heart. What is interesting is that the stem cells were taken from the boy's own blood."
new? (Score:1)
Interesting evolution though, even though it's absolutely not certain that this technique is 'good', it's more like a shot in the dark, let's hope it works AFAIK.
Re:new? (Score:2)
Re:new? (Score:2)
My broken hearts (Score:1, Funny)
Re:Why this is good (Score:1)
Poetry heals too-- you might try Solace [robotwisdom.com].
Just really cool biology (Score:3, Interesting)
Now if those guys in florida will finish their testing on oral bacteria replacement therapy [globaltechnoscan.com] I will look to old age with much less anxiety.
Own Stem Cells (Score:4, Informative)
The reason scientists want to use embryonic stem cells is that they are easier to study, not to use. There is no ethical/moral consideration about using stem cells - it's using embryonic stem cells that everyone kicks up a fuss about - and they are being used for study, they are not practical to be used for actual treatment.
Re:Own Stem Cells (Score:3, Insightful)
I think it's very interesting to see good medicine being advanced.
Re:Own Stem Cells (Score:2)
This is a no brainer. If you can, use your own cells. It's disgusting that some people actually talk down the idea of using your own stem cells in order to create/preserve a secondary revenue stream for abortion clinics.
Re:Own Stem Cells (Score:1, Insightful)
Yes, fetuses are a veritable font of neverending stem cells, but that's not the only place they come from. What really irks me is that while abortion is perfectly legal (as well it should be), there's controversy surrounding the use of fetal stem cells. I don't understand why it's such an issue. Let's see, we have two choices,
a) Pregnant woman gets abortion, fetus is disposed of as biohazard
b) Pregnant woman gets abortion, embryonic stem cells are harvested for medical research
I can't grasp why people find option b horrifying. The abortions are going to happen anyway; we might as well get some medical benefit from the process. Every one of us, no matter what we do or don't believe in, is human. We all stand to benefit from this research.
Re:Own Stem Cells (Score:3, Interesting)
In *every* industry, lower costs and you get higher demand. Secondary revenue sources like selling fetal tissue for experimentation (no, I know that's not technically what happens, it's just effectively so) and harvesting stem cells allows for subsidized abortion costs as a significant source of profit is the scientific community, not just the fee paid by the mother. Lower the cost and like clockwork abortion demand will go up at the margin.
Pro-abortion forces are trying to shift scientific funding so that embryonic stem cells get more money than adult stem cell research. They have bogus FUD campaigns about how stem cell research has more promise when all the practical stem cell treatments discovered to date are from adult stem cells.
the pro-abortion side cloaks itself in the mantle of science but what they're really after is protecting their lifestyle choice and making sure their enablers at the clinic stay in business. That's just wrong.
Re:Own Stem Cells (Score:2, Insightful)
Or, if you don't care about civil society, by trying to legislate your way out of it. (This is my not-so-subtle dig at China.)
While we're at it, that's not a fact. It's a naive supposition. And not a very well formulated one at that.
Re:Own Stem Cells (Score:1)
Actually, it's more like this.
FACT: If one percent of the Earth were covered with plants that were one percent efficent, we would be able to produce enough food to feed 50 billion people at 3500 kilocalories per day. That's enough to get fat on. If we would stop wasting good farmland on stuff that actively kills us (tobacco, alcohol, etc), then the US could feed the rest of the world singlehandedly. The reason people starve is greed. Warlords use starvation as a weapon against their own people.
FACT: If we mined even a small asteroid for minerals, we wouldn't need to mine most things from the Earth for quite some time.
All we need to do to support far more than 50 billion people is get our act together and start developing technologies that will help us to get the resources we need.
I do, however, support the death penalty for horible criminals. There is no reason for us to support them in prison for any longer than we must. Why should they be allowed to live off of our work? If they can be rehabilitated, then go for it, but otherwise, they are simply eating food that could help someone more deserving.
Re:Own Stem Cells (Score:3, Interesting)
From what I've seen, embryonic stem cells were what we started working with because we couldn't isolate stem cells in adults. Since we had the opportunity to work with pure concentrations of them from embryos, we've managed to figure out how to isolate them.
Thus, embryonic stem cell research was essential and is probably waning in necessity as we can now isolate quantities of stem cells from adults and children.
Re:Own Stem Cells (Score:2)
And since you can get hearts, kidney, and other organs from other people without them being rejected (although that comes with a little help from drugs), I don't see why other peoples stem cells necessarily would be rejected by the body.
Actually, I am not at all sure that stem cells are easier to study in general. After all, it is only in recent years that so-called cell lines, self-growing cell populations, have been constructed. If you are looking for easy to use cell-lines, I think you go to cancer cells: They have a tendency to grow without much encouragement!
Re:Own Stem Cells (Score:2)
Scientists want to use your own stem cells to regrow organs. Embryonic stem cells are not used for treatment, but only for research. The whole advantage of stem cells is that you can replace/patch up, say, your heart, with 0% chance of rejection because it can be grown from your own cells.
Using someone elses stem cells totally negates this - you might as well have a transplant.
Quake related accident? (Score:4, Funny)
Wow - I broke my thumb once and tried to convince people I'd sustained it during a particularly mouse intensive game of Quake II, but this is just going too far.
Re:Quake related accident? (Score:2)
you must admit that he was lucky not to get gibbed, kinda hard to reconstruct from that.
Broken Heart (Score:1)
Bush is going to use this to ban all cloning (Score:1, Flamebait)
Re:Bush is going to use this to ban all cloning (Score:1)
Not a substitute for embryonic stem cells (Score:3, Informative)
Embryonic stem cells -- the ones from embryos a few days old, also called pluripotent stem cells -- can develop into any kind of cell in the body. The ones used in this experiment must have been multipotent stem cells, because the other kinds disappear long before birth. Multipotent stem cells come in may variations, some more specialized than others. Each kind can turn into a limited number of tissue types. See this [viacellinc.com] for more info.
BTW, the embryos from which embryonic stem cells are taken were not aborted. They couldn't be -- to get pluripotent stem cells, you need embryos only a few days old. The source of those is fertility clinics, which created them as part of in vitro fertilization. For various reasons, fertility clinics sometimes have leftovers. It's quite a stretch to associate them with abortion in any way, and I fail a consistent line of reasoning that could allow these leftover embryos to be destroyed but discourage using them in medicine or science.
Appears to be non-invasive (Score:2)
Compare a small 1/4" long 3 inch deep incision to a 4-5" cut + chest spreader that most operations require and compare which method causes more trauma to the body, I think this stem cell/cathador technique wins hands down.
Potentially though, this is going to save a lot of people. I wonder if the application is just limited to the heart, or if it can be used for any organ (for instance, my mucas filled lungs and ulcer pocked stomach)
The procedure seems simple enough even where it could be an outpatient therapy depending on what needs to be treated. Sorta neat how the body just lets those stems cells stick right to it.
Re:Appears to be non-invasive (Score:3, Interesting)
My friend is a nurse in training. He said he recently observed open-heart surgery. He described to me how they had to yank staples out of this guys chest, like, bracing their feet against the bed and YANKING! And then came the saw... He told me blood and other junk was flying out of the guy, and that the smell of burning flesh from constantly coterizing the wounds was nearly unbearable... People say they feel like they've been hit by a truck after waking up... I deliver drugs in the hospital and it always creeps me out to go to open-heart recovery... everyone looks like a zombie.
Wheras this catheter business is practically out-patient surgery. My friend's dad just had a simmilar operation (minus the stem cells