Fetuses Provide Stem-Like Cells to Mothers 155
Flatline5150 writes "Excerpt from this
article on Boston.com: 'Many a pregnant woman has moments when her fetus seems like a little parasite, all take, take, take. But new research suggests that a fetus may also be giving back a lifelong gift: cells that appear to act like stem cells, migrating to diseased organs in the mother and trying to fix them.'"
So this means... (Score:3, Funny)
Doctors are going to have a whale of time!
"Bend over the table Miss Johnson. I'm going to cure your cancer. It may take several doses though..."
Re:So this means... (Score:5, Funny)
previous research... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:previous research... (Score:2)
Re:previous research... (Score:3, Informative)
http://nasw.org/users/ccmorton/globesamplemay20
I think there was another article on this earlier this year or last year but I can't remember where.
Re:previous research... (Score:2)
Re:previous research... (Score:2, Informative)
If a mother's blood is Rh- (ie her blood is A-, B-, AB-, or O-), and she has an Rh+ baby and is exposed to that baby's blood, she will start to produce antibodies to that Rh+ factor. If the woman gets pregnant with another Rh+ baby, her body can launch an immune response to that baby, causing all sorts of problems. Nowadays doctors test for and anticipate the problem, and simply give the mom a shot of anti-D immunoglobin, which
Well then.. (Score:2)
Re:Well then.. (Score:2)
Re:Well then.. (Score:2)
When and how does this occur, and what effects do abortion at different stages to the this factor?
"No big mystery" indeed..
Re:Well then.. (Score:2, Informative)
The article says "...but seem to remain forever in the blood of such women, including those who miscarry or abort."
Re:Well then.. (Score:2, Insightful)
It kills the baby. Next question?
Re:Well then.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Read this story [bbc.co.uk] and watch the accompanying slideshow [bbc.co.uk]. The article basically shows that babies in the womb are as active as those outside the womb.
Whose ass is grass? (Score:3, Insightful)
My goodness, it'd be hard for you to be wronger! (-:
The cells at that point are totally human and nearly undifferentiated, which is quite a different thing to being grass cells or whatever. What you're promulgating is exactly the same lie as the "it's only a fish... it's only a reptile..." bullshit which was common a dec
Re:Whose ass is grass? (Score:2)
I almost puked sitting right here in my cube. The buckets full of body parts was the deal breaker.
My opinion isn't changed, as I have always been on the side opposing abortions.
jason
Who will speak? (Score:2)
Welcome to real life. Stripping away illusions like that is seldom pleasant, but it makes us more rational, capable people every time.
As to "opposing abortion", that's a complex question. What it basically boils down to is whether you're willing to speak for those who have no voice or not.
Too many people are willing to tie reason up and burn it on the altar of convenience - and one example of that is people arbitrarily decreeing unborn babies to in some way
Re:Who will speak? (Score:2)
I am not a proponent of allowing parents (or anyone) to get away with out the consequences of their actions. How else are people to learn?
jason
Re:Who will speak? (Score:2)
I'll ignore all of the unwarranted dribble about reverting to the stone age, and just answer this one point very, very clearly:
What does that tell you (you as in Tree131) about the motiv
Life expectancy? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Life expectancy? (Score:2)
I can see it now! Watch the overcrowding of orphanages begin as the newest trend in the name of beauty takes hold!
"Estelle, are you putting on a little wait?"
"Why, heavans no, Claire, I'm just going through a little procedure. I'll look ten years younger and live five more years after it's finished in nine months."
"Is that true? What do I have to do?"
Re:Life expectancy? (Score:2)
I'd always assumed that lower cancer incidence rates in these cases had something to do with the idea that using the organs helps keep them fit (an idle womb is the (cancer) devil's workshop?) Or, that the long-term use of hormone-manipulating birth control might take a toll som
Re:Life expectancy? (Score:3, Informative)
simulates pregnancy (like the pill) reduce a women's risk of ovarian cancer.
Re:Life expectancy? (Score:3, Interesting)
Also the stem cells are there, but they may be a cause or contributing factor to the disease. Perhaps the woman's immune system has been "detuned" to not kill those stem cells, and because of that detuning it's not so good at killing diseased cells (malignant/nonm
Re:Life expectancy? (Score:2)
In Traditional Chinese Medicine, it is thought that men should try to conserve their semen as much as possible, as it is viewed as their source of vital energy. The more you ejaculate, the more it reduces your life expectancy.
Similarly, I remember reading something on a website linked by sex-blog operated by the same people who operate gizmodo.com that japanese "butter dogs" are not to be, uh, made to ejaculate more than once a day, because it can cut t
Re:Life expectancy? (Score:2)
In Traditional Chinese Medicine, it is thought that men should try to conserve their semen as much as possible, as it is viewed as their source of vital energy. The more you ejaculate, the more it reduces your life expectancy.
... and beliefs like that are the reason that folk medicine, no matter how effective it may occasionally be, generally fails in comparison to "Western" (actually, just scientific, which is emphatically culture-neutral) medicine. The beliefs may happen to correspond with biological
Re:Life expectancy? (Score:2)
but hey, you dont have to take my word for it, try it out for yourself.
Re:Life expectancy? (Score:2)
Re:Life expectancy? (Score:2)
IANAG(uy), so I can't test the ejaculation portion of the hypothesis. However, nobody with whom I've ever been involved seems to have had any problem with their regular workout the next morning, and I certainly don't notice any. Doing without coffee is more likely to cause me pr
Re:Life expectancy? (Score:2)
I also remember reading studies on how semen depletion can affect muscle mass increase (or lack thereof) following a workout.
But those didnt examine if people got exhausted faster or not.
I do feel a difference in stamina only when I try to go beyond my strength (which is what I consider a *real* workout), until my muscles (and not my mind) give up. If I had sex the night before, my leg muscles' strength doesn't last as long as when
Hey! I'm a guy! No Fair! (Score:3, Funny)
Maybe something like THIS [imdb.com] might be possible eventually, though.
-- Kevin J. Rice
Re:Hey! I'm a guy! No Fair! (Score:3, Funny)
Where Dr. Seuss gestates fetuses (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Hey! I'm a guy! No Fair! (Score:3, Funny)
Thank you, Sister Judith. (Score:2)
mmmmmmmmmm... (Score:5, Funny)
Eating pregnant mothers can be even healthier !
Re:mmmmmmmmmm... (Score:2)
It is almost certainly because of the rich supply of nutrients within it that they do so, although the hormonal content may also help promote milj production and the expulsion of any other materials in the womb.
This isn't my area of science, but I used to be a stock farmer.
No need for a 'stem cell battle' after all? (Score:4, Interesting)
Thats why some couples start looking alike? (Score:2)
The "two become one flesh" thing might be a bit more literal than some people might think. Using ones sense of smell to help choose a mate might be useful in getting a better genetic match - of course that's assuming you don't have artificial hormones and scents screwing things up. Some women's cycles cause them to flip from one preference (more similar genes) to another (more different) though...
N
Applications for Tinnitus? (Score:2)
Tinnitus is truly an unmet medical need. I'm sure that many of us who suffer with trauma to the inner ear wonder what stem-cell research portends for us. In the meantime the Amer [ata.org]
Yet another reason... (Score:2)
Yet [barnesandnoble.com] another [barnesandnoble.com] reason [imdb.com], far as I'm concerned [slashdot.org], to get that bum out of office! [cnn.com]
Blastocyst != baby (Score:2)
Answer: I don't hate babies, even when they spit up. (Or have incredibly stinky diapers.) But we're not talking about babies here. We're not even talking about human fetuses (which despite all of the rhetoric to the contrary, do fit all of the same criteria as other parasitic organisms. The only difference is that the female of other parasitic o
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Blastocyst != baby (Score:2)
Can you tell me when it becomes a human being? At what point does it become precious human life, and you should get locked up for destroying it? It has to happen sometime.
Re:Exciting (Score:5, Insightful)
>>Many a pregnant woman has moments when her fetus seems like a little parasite, all take, take, take.
Offensive to you only because of your insistence on moralizing a morally neutral phenomenon. In placental mammals, the fetus is parasitic on the mother. There's nothing offensive about that. It simply is the way it is. Your religious viewpoint is leading you to ascribe pejorative values to a biological term that has none.>That seems to be the most offensive viewpoint I think a parent could take towards their child. Surely they could have come up with a better description? The rest of the article is pretty upbeat about mothers, but starting the article off like that is really offensive.
Re:Exciting (Score:4, Informative)
Well, that was the old view of it, but if fetuses contribute stem cells to the mother then they are no longer simple parasites, at least according to my dictionary:
# Biology. An organism that grows, feeds, and is sheltered on or in a different organism while contributing nothing to the survival of its host.
Re:Exciting (Score:2)
Note Con: most parasites that affect us do so to our harm.
Note Pro: My wife (after 3 children) has mentioned several times each pregnancy feeling the parasitic nature of the relationship, not grudgingly, but as an acknowledgement of facts.
Alas, diversity of opinion about reproductive issues... Hmm. Imagine that... Combined with mention of hot-button term 'stem cell
Re:Exciting (Score:2)
Re:Exciting (Score:2)
People use the term "parasite" to justify abortion by comparing the fetus to an unwanted aggressive parasite. This is what FroMan was obviously reacting to, not the simple technical defin
Re:Exciting (Score:2)
This is your opinion, nothing more. After browsing around looking for information on parasites, there are many aspects of the mother / child relationship that simply do not meet the classical defintion of "parasite". For example, some definitions insist that the "parasite" enter the host externally. In this case, the fetus originates from within the woman. Some definitons mention that in a true symbiotic relationship, the organisms must be different species -
Re:Exciting (Score:2)
The argument that we don't know how developed the child must be to survive outside he womb so we have to assume conception is ridiculous. We know fairly well how long, and we know that it's WAY after conception and far far closer to 9months. If you remove artificial means simulating some of the conditions of the womb and keeping the baby alive it's birth and sometimes not even then.
In rega
Re:Exciting (Score:2)
Actually, babies that are born as early as 19 weeks are sometimes saved. I personally know the parents of a baby who was bor
Re:Exciting (Score:2)
My argument is that it's the same science your trying to hinder that allows these babies to live in the first place. I suppose you want your cake and to eat it too?
19 weeks, hmm ok so that is over 4 months in which it is perfectly fine to take a collection of cells which are ONLY interesting BECAUSE THEY ARE NOT A BABY.
Science and technology is what allows a rather massive number of babies to survive, including pretty much
Re:Exciting (Score:2)
If that's what you believe, it sounds like you have turned your back on traditional religion and instead joined a cult of science instead.
Re:Exciting (Score:2)
Who's a nut? You've got it all wrong. Most Christians (I don't know about other religions) who oppose cloning do so because in most cases, the proponents of cloning do not place any value on the life of the cloned individual. Christians believe that all people have a soul, including those created by cloning, and that's why efforts to create clones for harvesting (e.g., "therapeutic cloning") are so vigorously oppose
Re:Exciting (Score:2)
We all need a purpose in life...what is yours?
Re:Exciting (Score:2)
The science you disclaim involves experiments and studies which clash with religions. You like the end result (that more babies live) but you don't like and ignore the means (everything which saves the life of a child now once had to be tested on children in the past... for everything that works, there were dozens which did not
De novo, ex nihilo (Score:2)
The principles from ancient Egypt is hogwash. Egypt copied a lot of stuff from Israel. Specifically, Moses and the people he was imported with had a massive impact on their culture. Their medicine and stuff is totally different - you won't find lizard blood and camel dung in Irael's prescriptions - and so are most other things, despi
Re:De novo, ex nihilo (Score:2)
It's a nice try, too bad there are writtings of Osiris that predate the Hebrews as slaves in Egypt. And too bad there is a story of an Egyptian magi parting the sea which predates the birth of Moses by over 500yrs.
If that dating is based on Sothic Cycles... (Score:2)
Re:Exciting (Score:2)
The term 'stem cells' refers to a whole range of massively differentiable types of cells. Don't you think that it is at least plausible that there are certain types of cells that exist in an undifferentiated embryo, and nowhere else?
It's arguments like yours that would go so far as to seek to prevent us from finding out.
Re:Exciting (Score:2)
> And here you exemplify the reason I find the reference offensive. To you it is nothing more than a mass of tissue. To me it is a life. Not just a life, but a human life. I'll spare you any religious arguments behind it as they would be a waste of electrons from your viewpoint.
Actually, I have two daughters and am happily married to their mother. Your presumption that I regarded them in utero as a "mass of tissue" is offensive to me. You are making assumptions about me and my beliefs that are unwar
Re:Exciting (Score:2)
Re:Exciting (Score:2)
Re:Exciting (Score:2)
Re:Exciting (Score:2)
I have been involved in the talk.origins evolution/creation {newsgroup, flamewar, beating of dead equines} for ten years. There's a tone to the language of the True Believer (tm) that I guess I picked up on. I agree with you WRT pro-life or pro-choice that you will find religious people on both sides as well as atheists on both sides, althou
Scale (Score:2)
> I'd say I'm as religious as FroMan, possibly more
Interesting. How do you compare or, for that matter, measure religiousness?
Re:Scale (Score:2)
Re:Scale (Score:2)
1. It is inherently subjective (how religios a person considers himself) and thus unsuitable for any comparison.
2. It is built to fit a specific religion.
Saying "I am more religious than you" is meaningless.
Re:Exciting (Score:2)
Were you waiting for a chance to sound off this morning when you woke up? Perhaps you were thinking that you could find some obscure reference that allows you to push your morality down everyone else's throat...telling us that we
Re:Exciting (Score:2)
Why do you insist on make this more complicated than it is? One thing any
Re:Exciting (Score:2)
The simple act of breathing certainly does not solely imbue so-called "personhood" - animals breathe too. Can someone who is alive not breathe? People can be put on respirators who cannot breathe for themselves.
Re:Exciting (Score:2)
Re:Exciting (Score:2, Informative)
The reason embryonic stem cells are the niftiest, is because they can be transformed into any other cells. Other
Re:Exciting (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Exciting (Score:2)
People are people. Babies are people.
A tiny clump of a few hundred cells does not a person make.
You (just like everyone else) probably shed more skin cells in a day than the total combined mass of your "brothers and sisters", as you call them.
Re:Exciting (Score:2)
Actually, it does [lebenswissen.de].
Re:Exciting (Score:2)
>Actually, it does [lebenswissen.de].
No, it doesn't.
That's a picture of a later-stage embryo. A tiny blastocyst of a few hundred cells, as would be frozen in a test tube, looks like this [advancedfertility.com] on day 5 of development.
Re:Exciting (Score:2)
Re:Exciting (Score:2)
I think most people would agree that:
A hundred billion cells = maybe a person.
A few hundred cells = definitely not.
Re:Exciting (Score:2)
So, when did you become a person? If not by cell 100, then when? 1,000? 1,000,000? I mean, it had to happen sometime. Cell count just seems like a silly and arbitrary way to define "personhood", since it doesn't seem like few dozen cells (and by induction, a few hundered or hundred million) should determine if you are a "person" with a natural right to life or not.
Re:Exciting (Score:2)
I'm extremely leery of extending full human rights to a newly-fertilized egg, or a group a a hundred cells. On the other hand, a baby that can survive with some help, even if extremely premature, is certainly more of a person than a blastocyst (at least in my conception).
I'm not entirely sure when personhood starts. It does have to happen at some point, but I'd be more inclined to think t
Re:Exciting (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Exciting (Score:3, Interesting)
The skin cells I shed are dead and were only a temporary part of my being. Designed, implemented and affected to live for some amount of time die and be removed. This is very much different from a child who needs to move 6 inches to be given actual legal rights in this country.
Actually, in some sense, one could argue that the skin cells you shed are much more valuable than a clump of ~75 undifferentiated fetal cells.
After all, your skin cells have served a pu
Re:Exciting (Score:2)
Be realistic people. You seriously think abortion is going to ever be abolished? It's here and it's not going anywhere... it's on such a massive scale that you cannot possibly stop it; even if it is eliminated legally there will still be "back alley" abortions.
So why not USE the fetuses that are BEING ABORTED ANYWAY. Let me repeat myself. Use the fetuses that are BEING ABORTED ANYWAY, whether it's because of rape or incest, the mother just not wanting th
Re:Exciting (Score:2)
Alert: Monitoring equipment for broodmare CX29-B reports increase in uterine activit
just say no. and leave us alone. (Score:2, Insightful)
Why don't you people have a movement that simply refuses to use the results of such research and spare the rest of us of your religious propaganda.
I personally do not want to die of some disease that took 20 years longer to cure because of people who can't distinguish a zygote from a human being.
Re:just say no. and leave us alone. (Score:2)
Re:just say no. and leave us alone. (Score:2)
Re:Exciting (Score:2)
Re: Parasite (Score:3, Insightful)
Well then, Mr FroMan (I'm guessing unmarried and childless), prepare to be offended. I know over a dozen mothers in their 30s and EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM had that exact feeling at least once during each pregnancy.
It's a natural reaction, because it happens to be true.
Re:Exciting (Score:2)
I remember hearing something like this too, actually. You've got a mass of undifferentiated cells programmed to use all available nutrients and grow like crazy. At some level, that does sound a lot
Re:Exciting (Score:2)
Don't confuse embryos with stem cells. I don't know what, besides a baby, you think this [lebenswissen.de] might become.
Re:Exciting (Score:2)
A dog is closer to a human than a fetus, at least a dog has a brain and thinks. It's intelligence which is significant, not a physical shape or structure.
Re:Exciting (Score:2)
Re:...But very alarming.... (Re:Exciting) (Score:2)
Re:Does this mean???? (Score:2)
Uhhhhh, No (Score:2)
Your lung is a part and parcel of your body, literally sprung from your DNA. Bactieria are not. They are completely dependant on you, but are not truly part of you. You can kill off your bactieria and live. You can't kill off your lungs and live (without artificial breathing assistance).
Re:religion-based stem cell research (Score:2)
False reading.
Exodus, 21:22 indicates, [if the child is born early, but _the child_ is undamaged, then there is merely punishment by a judge for the intended harm]. It's like an "assault" charge. aka "intent to cause bodily harm", today, even if no harm was done. THere is still a penalty for that.
This is in contrast to the case where the child is prematurely born, and there is injury to the child.
Re:religion-based stem cell research (Score:2)
A cesarean section isnt technicaly "being born" either, but the result is still incontrovertibly alive, if successful.
As far as "being alive" vs "being a person":
A human being can be in a vegetative state. They are still considered "a person" in most sense, and have all the legal rights thereof, last I checked. However, they are arguably less "
Re:religion-based stem cell research (Score:2)
Hence the rules about not masturbating and wasting life material by spilling it on the ground instead of where it could grow to become a person.
Actually, there is no such rule. That's a Roman Catholic reading, that as far as I can see, has no real scriptural basis. The actual offense in that case, (Genesis 38:9), was in not upholding the command to impregnate your brother's wife, if he dies without an heir.
[for the curious onlooker, the command presumably