Scientists Use Stem Cells To Regenerate the External Layer of a Human Heart (indy100.com) 51
schwit1 quotes a report from Indy100: A team of scientists from Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School have used adult skin cells to regenerate functional human heart tissue. The study, published in the journal Circulation Research, detailed that the team took adult skin cells, using a technique called messenger RNA to turn them into pluripotent stem cells, before inducing them to become two different types of cardiac cells. Then for two weeks they infused the hearts with a nutrient solution, allowing them to develop under the same circumstances a heart would grow inside a human body. After the two week period, the hearts contained well-structured tissue, which appeared similar to that contained in developing human hearts. When shocked with electricity, they started beating. This represents the closest that medical researchers have come to growing an entire beating human heart.
Re: How Many Babies Died For Your Stem Cells? (Score:2, Insightful)
None? They're made from skin cells
Re: How Many Babies Died For Your Stem Cells? (Score:4, Informative)
It's just not necessary, unless researchers need totipotent cells, since pluripotent cells are what's being discussed here.
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Since 2006, they've had the ability to convert your own adult cells into pluripotent stem cells. Why the heck would you extract them from an embryo?
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you seem to be pretty irrational in your response.
GP was wrong to not read carefully and assume, (like lots of people) that all stem cells are embryonic stem cells (which btw are pretty useless scientifically) and this involved latter. sibling reply has already addressed that mistake before you,
but you are wrong to say "please keep religious to yourself" and "please don't vote or put yourself in any position of responsibility as you don't seem qualified".
1/ he did not refer to religion.
2/ one can be anti ab
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I'm pro-science and anti-abortion. Most of my friends are. That statement is literally like saying "How can you be pro-science and vegan". Both are saying you cannot support science while respecting life.
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"Respecting Life" is an arbitrary moral code that runs counter to logic. You know any carnivorous mammal has to kill more than one thing to live, so logically you would want to exterminate entire species to respect life under the same code. Oh wait, it's more subtle to that and has a bunch of religious mumbo jumbo behind something about humans being special? Right, you're a liar and a nut, just like most of your "friends" with which you're trying to make some specious rationalization.
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Womble, we know that the fetus is viable on it's own after 20 weeks of gestation, so at that point, from a scientific standpoint the only difference between a fetus and a baby is location of residence and method of getting nutrients. Further, we have scientifically advanced our definition of human life (and human death) as the presence of lack of brain activity. For the fetus, this begins at around 6 weeks. Thus, from our current understanding and legal definition of human life, which we apply across the
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This is an excellent point. I'm getting tired of activists who, having run out of all scientifically verifiable reasons to oppose some construction project or even a new scientific development, resort to vague claims of sacredness - in this case, using a religious position that doesn't even apply to the technology being applied. I hope these people get ground under the treads of the incoming administration so we can finally get our telescopes and pipelines built.
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Re:How Many Babies Died For Your Stem Cells? (Score:4, Insightful)
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if you're lumping Muslim extremists in with Christians
Hate to break it to you, all current major religions were started by bronze age goat herders.
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I'm really going to miss Wheeler though. Brightest star in Obama's tenure. The speculation on his replacement is grim.
In their (generally laudable) opposition to the insane overregulation foisted upon the country by Democrats, Republicans have forgotten that regulation IS appropriate and beneficial when it levels a playing field for competition. They are idiots to cede that issue to the Democrats.
mRNA is not a technique (Score:3, Informative)
FYI, all cells use an intermediate form of nucleic acid (i.e., mRNA) to produce proteins. mRNA is transcribed from the host cell DNA and translated to construct protein(s) using ribosomes (yet another form of nucleic acid: rRNA).
Link in summary needs modification (Score:2, Informative)
The hyperlink in the summary should be modified to the following:
http://www.popsci.com/scientists-grow-transplantable-hearts-with-stem-cells?con=TrueAnthem&dom=fb&src=SOC&utm_campaign=&utm_content=58753766a167da00066f21ce&utm_medium=&utm_source=
The summary link leads to a summary of a different news article at Popular Science (above link). The Popular Science article provides sufficient information to understand the techniques used to produce stem cells to regrow cardiac tissue.
Old News (Score:1)
PopSci had this story nearly a year ago ... back in March 2016
Has the baby been born..? (Score:2)
Has the baby been born that will live to it's 200th birthday?
Still won't help with a broken heart ... (Score:2)
if your girlfriend dumps you ... stem cell technology still has a long way to go ...
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We've had cloning for long.
For those who don't RTFA or UTFA (Score:5, Informative)
(understand the fucking article)
The summary is somewhat inaccurate and oversimplified (this is Slashdot, of course).
The authors took donor hearts and removed all the cardiac cells, leaving only the extracellular matrix, which is the scaffolding that cells reside in. They then created stem cells from skin cells, not via a technique called "messenger RNA" (which is a type of biological molecule and not a technique), but by reprogramming the skin cells by providing synthetic messenger RNAs that instruct the cells to make 5 proteins that cause a "reversal" to a stem cell-like state. These new stem cells were instructed to become cardiac cells, which spontaneously exhibited "a heart beat", and then seeded onto slices of the cardiac matrix from a donor heart, and even a full heart. The cells contracted in unison, and could be "paced" by a "pacemaker".
Limitations of this approach are that the you need a human heart to start with (until a scaffold could be 3D printed, for example), cells did not fully differentiate into mature heart muscle cells, don't seem to maintain this fate past a certain time frame, didn't develop into all cell types needed for a functioning heart, and contracted with only a fraction of the force that a normal human heart does. But damn, the bioreactor with "grown" heart is incredible to behold (figure 6E), and this appears to be an interesting step forward to lab grown organs.
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What's new is that instead of having cells in a dish that "beat", they have cells approximating the size and shape of a left ventricle or cross-sections of a human heart and are exhibiting correct functional behavior (although not quite at the level of performance of a normal heart). This is arguably one of the first major steps in going from patient's skin cells -> stem cells -> cardiac cells in a dish -> cardiac cells in the shape of a heart -> lab grown heart. (Probably a step or two downplay
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Your analogy is not exactly correct. Think of it as removing the bricks from a building and leaving all of the mortar in place. You then put new bricks into the mortar scaffolding where the old ones were. Oddly, you mention soap, which is sort of what is used to lyse (dissolve) the cells and not affect the matrix. They have photographs and present other data of the scaffolding (ECM), as well as test it to make sure it isn't altered. This is far from the first time this technique to remove cells from a matri
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Absolutely not unimaginable, which is why it is so cool. I see two really hard problems to solve on that path: 1) getting cells to differentiate into the appropriate cell types in the right place; 2) getting the vasculature correct.
#1 is hard when starting with a scaffold, where everything is adult-sized from the start and has to be organized at the end. Maybe we'll need breakthroughs in understanding regeneration in animals capable of it (e.g., newts) and how they regrow adult-sized structures, rather than
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As I recall these kinds of approaches also have problems with different cell types, i.e. a heart grown on a matrix isn't going to work very well without arteries.
I don't think the fact that you start with an existing heart is a very big deal. As I understand it most donated hearts can't be transplanted for one reason or another and could be used if this technique was made to work.