Chinese Team Claims Stem Cell Breakthrough in Mice Study (newatlas.com) 62
"Researchers at Tsinghua University in China have developed a new drug cocktail that can convert cells into totipotent stem cells, the very seeds of life..." writes New Atlas:
Not all stem cells are created equal — they sit in a branching hierarchy of differentiation potential. Multipotent stem cells are found in many tissues in adults, where they can turn into a few types of cells associated with that tissue or organ to help healing. A step earlier in the development tree are pluripotent stem cells, which are found in embryos and can become almost any type of cell in the body.
But at the top of the chain sit what are known as totipotent stem cells, which can become any cell in the body as well as supportive tissues like the placenta. These mark the very beginning of development, including the first single cell that forms from a fertilized egg, and they persist for the first few stages of development. After that, the cells differentiate into pluripotent stem cells and further specialize into all the cells of the body as it develops.
In recent years scientists have been able to take adult cells and induce a pluripotent state in them, which forms the basis of research into stem cell regenerative medicine. But in the new study, the Tsinghua team took things a step further, returning pluripotent stem cells to a totipotent state for the first time...
This breakthrough could open up some major new opportunities, the team says. In the long run, scientists could potentially create a living organism straight from a mature cell, sidestepping the need for sperm and eggs. That could help people have children who otherwise couldn't, or aid conservation of endangered species.
The researchers do acknowledge, however, that ethical concerns will no doubt arise.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader hackingbear for sharing the news.
But at the top of the chain sit what are known as totipotent stem cells, which can become any cell in the body as well as supportive tissues like the placenta. These mark the very beginning of development, including the first single cell that forms from a fertilized egg, and they persist for the first few stages of development. After that, the cells differentiate into pluripotent stem cells and further specialize into all the cells of the body as it develops.
In recent years scientists have been able to take adult cells and induce a pluripotent state in them, which forms the basis of research into stem cell regenerative medicine. But in the new study, the Tsinghua team took things a step further, returning pluripotent stem cells to a totipotent state for the first time...
This breakthrough could open up some major new opportunities, the team says. In the long run, scientists could potentially create a living organism straight from a mature cell, sidestepping the need for sperm and eggs. That could help people have children who otherwise couldn't, or aid conservation of endangered species.
The researchers do acknowledge, however, that ethical concerns will no doubt arise.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader hackingbear for sharing the news.
Uh huh (Score:5, Insightful)
China also said they confirmed the validity of the EMdrive and that turned out to be false, so... I'll wait for more reliable parties to confirm this.
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You stole my comment subject... :)", this feels a bit laughable...
After the last "we totally found the aliens!", shortly followed up by "oh wait never mind
That said, peer review and duplication of results within an independent study are the cornerstones of verification - so until that happens, this is simply a nice paper they've submitted that proposes it might potentially be possible, but also isn't verifiable in the least.
Thanks news machine! You did the thing and made a headline. Clicky clicky and bux to
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After the last "we totally found the aliens!",
This is the original report. Does it mean "totally found"? (burgerland langage is not my native langage so I may not understand corretly, sorry)
"These are several narrow-band electromagnetic signals different from the past, and the team is currently working on further investigation," Zhang Tongjie, head scientist at the China Extraterrestrial Civilization Research Group at Beijing Normal University, told the Science and Technology Daily. "The possibility that the suspicious signal is some kind of radio interference is also very high, and it needs to be further confirmed and ruled out. This may be a long process."
Re:Uh huh (Score:4, Informative)
"isn't verifiable in the least" It isn't that it is not verifiable, it is that it has not yet been verified.
Re: Uh huh (Score:3)
Re: Uh huh (Score:1)
Anything out of asshoe China must be met with incredulity, heavy doses of skepticism, and actual scientific rigor. That entire country is untrustworthy and nefarious.
small dong science (Score:1, Funny)
"This breakthrough could open up some major new opportunities, the team says. In the long run, scientists could potentially allow us to create male children with normal sized dongs rather than the undersize dongs that are commonplace today in China."
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"rather than the undersize dongs that are commonplace today in China" This begs the obvious question, how do you know this? Have you been measuring them?
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https://www.worlddata.info/ave... [worlddata.info]
Door to in-vitro gametogenesis (Score:2, Troll)
If this is really true, that means humans are likely very close to unlocking level In-Vitro Gametogenesis. A process that has been shown to be possible in mice, but nobody dared try with humans. It means you can take any cell from a person, revert it to a totipotent cell .. then reprogram it to make it become a sperm or egg cell. It means, infertile couples, post-menopausal women, or gay couples, for example could make their own kids. Two men or two women could have biological kids together. Heck there migh
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I am excited about the prospects, not from the human-manufacture standpoint but because it will cause conservatives, religious nuts, and especially the "pro-lifers" to go mad. Just the lolz from that alone makes it worth doing at some point.
Leftists will have to label themselves as GMO if they use this technology, making their heads explode.
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Why? There is no genomic modification. No DNA code is changed.
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Unlike "R"s we don't need to FORCE women to fuck and bear our get. We just have to wait for them to want it.
Why didn't this Supreme Court admit they knew they were violating the 13th Amendment prohibition on FORCED labor?
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Why didn't this Supreme Court admit they knew they were violating the 13th Amendment prohibition on FORCED labor?
They knew what they were coming to do. That's why none of them came out and said they were or weren't going to overturn Roe. That would have been clear perjury. Instead it was a bunch of bullshit waffle about settled law. There is no such thing. That's why we have a supreme court, to argue about what the law means even after it is written and passed.
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It doesn't matter which partisan group it made happy. They overturned a ruling which isn't really consistent with the law in favor of one that is and returned a broad sweep of power to the state and local level where the people have far more political power.
There are plenty of common policies among states, you just have to convince the people who live in those states to agree with your idea of how they should live.
It also cuts both ways. Despite all their talk of codifying Roe the federal congress has no au
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It doesn't matter which partisan group it made happy.
The vast majority of Americans believe abortion should be legal. In case you didn't notice that means many red voters too.
There are plenty of common policies among states, you just have to convince the people who live in those states to agree with your idea of how they should live.
This is a minority of people who live in some states forcing others to agree with their idea of how they should live. There's no convincing. Only force.
After the botched management of liberal progressives
What liberal progressives?
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"The vast majority of Americans believe abortion should be legal. In case you didn't notice that means many red voters too."
Then they'll have no problem changing the state laws to reflect that.
"There's no convincing. Only force."
And this is in a nutshell your entire philosophy. You. A moron. Think the entire world should be reshaped to your views. You think a town of 100 shouldn't be able to live as they choose because there is a town of 1000 somewhere else. It isn't even good enough for each to be free to
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And this is in a nutshell your entire philosophy. You. A moron. Think the entire world should be reshaped to your views.
That's literally exactly the opposite of what I want. What I want is for the masses to prevail. If your argument against is that they're too stupid, guess what? Your team has been willfully compromising education for decades in order to produce low-information voters, because without such skullduggery they know they'd never win another election.
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"What I want is for the masses to prevail."
And force their will upon the rest. Tyranny of the majority. And since you haven't had a majority you've been importing a couple million without pesky american notions of individual freedom every year and convincing the domestics to kill 62 million of their own children keeping Americans below the break even rate for the last 50 years.
"Your team"
My TEAM? What team? Your team loves tyranny of the majority, they've loved it when they overrode Jefferson and kept their
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And force their will upon the rest.
There is simply no logic to claiming that pro-choice is forcing will on anyone else. Anti-abortion is doing that, however. You re!ch-wing hypocrites will always claim that you're not forcing anyone while you are, and that you're being forced when you aren't. You already had the right to live how you wanted to live, but you couldn't manage that, could you [americamagazine.org]? You can't control yourselves, so you have to control everyone.
Anti-abortionists always had the option to walk their talk, and have never managed it. They
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That's demonstrably false. What if some people don't want to live somewhere where murdering babies is ok? You may not believe it's murder, but they do. That's the whole point. And you're advocating they accept it. By force. Imagine if they passed a "choice" law where it was everyone had the choice to murder puppies. You, of course, have the option not to murder puppies, and everyone else's puppy slaughter doesn't affe
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What if some people don't want to live somewhere where murdering babies is ok?
Then they can live someplace with abortion, since abortion isn't murdering babies. How come you supposedly non-aborting people have just as many abortions as everyone else? If only you could learn to control yourselves without taking rights away from everyone else, that would be swell. But then, the whole history of Catholicism is one of rape, murder, hypocrisy and so on. And for that matter, most of the history of Christianity, too. You do the things you accuse everyone else of doing. You're fucking weak
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Again, this is the rub. I believe that. You believe that. They do not. And their opinion is as valid as yours or mine. Even scientists can't definitively agree when life officially begins. That's why the pregnancy week babies are considered lifeforms has constantly shifted and varies worldwide. Just because you personally don't believe the unborn child doesn't have rights and or is it not being killed doesn't make it so.
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This is nonsensical as are most of the things floating around right now. The supreme didn't do anything but rule according to what the law actually says. The federal government and the supreme court were not granted any power to decide the issue. It really is that simple.
Yes, it makes it hard to implement some kind of sweeping change and force it onto everyone else but the smaller the unit of government the more political power you have to impact YOUR life.
Even in the states which have restrictions at the m
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The federal government and the supreme court were not granted any power to decide the issue. It really is that simple.
That's literal nonsense. The federal government can make laws to promote the general welfare of the nation, that was basically a blank check and intended as such. The laws have to go through the usual process, and can't contradict the constitution. The constitution was meant to be amended as necessary over time. That's why there's a process for that. The Supreme Court's job is literally to decide these issues. Unfortunately, it's been stacked with disingenuous douchebags. Even more sadly, the Democrats let
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"The federal government can make laws to promote the general welfare of the nation, that was basically a blank check and intended as such."
False and anyone with knowledge of American history knows better. There is not and never was ANY intention to give the federal government any sort of blank check, the general welfare is a test the laws passed under the powers assigned. Even if a law is within the scope of powers granted congress it must be in the interest of the general welfare or it can overruled. Even
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Small government, huge Capitalists means powerless citizens. Because corporations are NOT people, my friend.
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You are claiming who is being forced? I suppose the mother is being forced to serve her child but that has always been the case for parents. At least for fathers, deadbeat mothers are permitted to give the child up for adoption. It isn't generally considered involuntary servitude when the work is a direct consequence of your own actions/choices and judgement.
"Small government, huge Capitalists means powerless citizens."
No small government means empowered citizens, capitalists or otherwise. But 'huge capital
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I am excited about the prospects, not from the human-manufacture standpoint but because it will cause conservatives, religious nuts, and especially the "pro-lifers" to go mad. Just the lolz from that alone makes it worth doing at some point.
Ah, spite [howstuffworks.com] one of the best reason for anyone to go down a slippery slope.
Re: Door to in-vitro gametogenesis (Score:1)
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I suppose it would be impossible for two lesbians to have a boy, though. No Y available.
Well, the theory is that the Y chromosome is disappearing, so in a few billion years, we might have to go that route anyway. Then again, the sun will probably burn out by then, so maybe it won't matter.
Either way, you could probably insert an SRY region into an X. Presumably it shouldn't be hard to insert 79 base pairs with CRISPR. Of course, if you want the result to not be sterile, you'd probably have to cut out some of the X bits, too.
Re: Door to in-vitro gametogenesis (Score:2)
Or, just use a donor Y chromosome. You will need some trickery to guarantee lyonization to avoid XXY syndrome, but that shouldnâ(TM)t be too hard.
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Well before the Sun "burns out" - before even the preceding phase of "Sun burns hot" (a.k.a the "red giant" phase) - the Sun will probably render the Earth uninhabitable by means of it's slowly increasing power output. Solar luminosity is increasing at about 5% per gigayear (1%/ 200 megayear), and has been for the last 4.5 Gyr. The exact end point is unclear, but at some point well before the Sun finally goes "red giant", that risi
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... because it will cause conservatives, religious nuts, and especially the "pro-lifers" to go mad. Just the lolz from that alone makes it worth doing at some point.
And me with no upvotes available. Sigh, thanks, I needed that!!
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Now THAT is going to cause some seriously twisted stuff. Celebrities they love or hate? Either way the kid is going to have a messed up life.
High school crush turn ya down? No problem, just get a sample and wait til it grows up.
Poor bunker kids.
Oh please, please ... (Score:2)
Irony (Score:3)
That could help people have children who otherwise couldn't, ...
This research from a country that had a one child policy for 35 years.
Nice (Score:2)
Now the Chinese have the first step forward to becoming 'the island', congrats
Jurassic Park Beginnings (Score:2)
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Douglas Adams called it (Score:1)
After centuries of trying, we finally discover the Fountain of Youth, and who gets it first?.. the fricken mice!
All hail our tiny immortal overlords!!
The Chinese claim LOTS of things. (Score:2)
99% of it is bullshit.
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100% of what Chas says is bullshit.
I've only read this one comment from Chas, but his track record is better than China. If Chas starts claiming he can clone people, detect distant alien civilizations, and 'generalize' cells, then I'll trust his comments as little as I do China's science community's discoveries.
ALL HAIL THE CHAS!
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An AC...talking about sock puppets.
in mice needs bolding (Score:2)
Try getting a treatment past the Ethics Review Committee which you can't reasonably confidently show will be less harmful than either the current standard treatment, or just living with the disease (whatever it is) : you'
A mouse cell in a test tube (Score:2)
Your rant is spot on for studies generally.
In this case, the study used cells (from mice) and saw that those cells did X in a test tube. There's no actual mice at that point. So it is more likely to apply to other mammal cells than if they had, say, given mice some medication. That is, they aren't doing anything "in mice". They are doing something in a test tube, with some cells. (Or lying).
After converting the cells, which is the breakthrough part, confirmation was provided in some cases by putting the ste
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So, in the universe of Ray Morris, isolated cells behave the same as cells in vivo.
Well, I suppose in theory, they do. But much more often than not, in practice you'll find that they don't.
I think I'll stick with those profoundly alternative medicine treatments that have passed multiple blinded trials and are other wise known as "conventional medicine".
That's what you said (in your subject line even) (Score:2)
If you READ my post, I think you'll find precisely the opposite.
You'll I'm the one who pointed out that no, it's cells in a test tube, it is not "in mice". If you read even your own subject line, you'll see YOU said "in mice". I pointed out that no, in a test tube is not the same as in mice.
A few cells in a test tube are somewhat likely to behave similarly to a few cells in a test tube.
Death penalty for scientific fraud in China. (Score:2)
.. you don't hear it in any other countries. That was the policy that was passed in 2017 after massive fraud involving 107 articles.
It's been a long wait... (Score:2)
But finally the prophecy has been fulfilled! The Elusive "Shaky's Pizza" stem cells have been found!
Welcome ... to Jurassic Park (Score:2)
Nature find a way, except 40 miles outside of Shanghai this time. International tourist attraction.
Two reasons to doubt this (Score:2)
Chinese Team (Score:1)
Bacta tanks! (Score:2)
I don't need a laser sword or a flying car, but bacta tanks would be awesome.