RKMBs Forums .::Important::. Politics and Current Events No embryos were harmed in the production of these stem cells...

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Australia Scientists Grow Adult Stem Cells from Nose

SYDNEY (Reuters) - With the help of the Catholic Church, Australian researchers have successfully grown adult stem cells harvested from the human nose, avoiding the ethical and legal problems associated with embryonic stem cells.

Australia bans creating human embryos to harvest stem cells but scientists may use embryos left over from IVF (in-vitro fertility) treatment. Stems cells harvested through other means, such as from the nose, is legal.

Head researcher Alan Mackay-Sim of Griffith University said the adult stem cells taken from inside the nose could potentially be used to grow nerve, heart, liver, kidney and muscle cells.

"We have got an adult stem cell which is accessible in everybody and we can grow lots of these cells and turn them into many other cell types," Mackay-Sim told Reuters.

"Apart from neural and brain cells, they look like they can turn into blood cells, heart muscle and to skeletal muscle," he said in an interview.

Scientists believe stem cell research could eventually lead to cures for a range of serious ailments, including Parkinson's disease (news - web sites) and spinal cord injuries.

The Catholic Church, which views the use of embryonic stem cells as a form of destruction of human life, helped fund the research through a A$50,000 ($39,500) grant, which was approved by Sydney's Catholic Archbishop George Pell.

"The significance of this is manifold. This represents a significant advance and I think this will bring a great blessing for people," Pell told Reuters on Thursday.

Australian Health Minister Tony Abbott said the new nose adult stem cells avert the ethical problems surrounding embryonic stem cell research.

"It seems at least on the basis of this research that we may well be able to obtain multi-potent stem cells from adults and that we don't need to use embyros to obtain these important cells," Abbott told reporters.

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Uschi said:
when everyone wins usually a compromise has to take place.

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"... the instructional correspondence between a senior demon, Screwtape, and his wannabe diabolical nephew Wormwood. As mentor, Screwtape coaches Wormwood in the finer points, tempting his "patient" away from God.

"Each letter is a masterpiece of reverse theology, giving the reader an inside look at the thinking and means of temptation. Tempters, according to Lewis, have two motives: the first is fear of punishment, the second a hunger to consume or dominate other beings."

"I have heard," Mildew begins, and blushes. "The fact is, Uncle, I have heard things that seem impossible. Is it really true that you have found a way to get them to eat — "

" — their young?" Screwtape interrupts with a hungry smile.
"Yes. Yes! I have found the key, the key, my boy, to unlocking the worst in the human heart. Oh, massacres are entertaining enough, and reasonably productive. Rapine and thieving and savagery and the usual nonsense go a good distance to wrecking men's souls, but not in sufficient numbers. Not for us to win for good — that is, ha-ha, for ill. We must forever be stoking grievances, feeding pride, and constantly thrusting and parrying with the Enemy and his agents. No, the beautifully corrupting key that I have found is vanity."

"Appetites, yes, but eating their young, Uncle? I feel sure that I read somewhere that humans are naturally revolted by cannibalism. "

Screwtape fixes his nephew with a shriveling glare. "We are not inducing them to broil the little tykes, dear boy, this is no fricassee of first-graders." He sighs heavily, a sufferer of fools, but then brightens, clearly distracted by a pleasing thought. "That's an idea, though. Must get Singer to write something up for me on that...excellent. Now, where — "

"Not broiling them."

"Yes. My achievement, the reason for this — " Screwtape gestures largely about the handsome apartment — "is that I have managed, by appealing to man's love of self, his vanity, to convince millions that it is not cannibalism, but progress, to turn tiny human infants into medicine. The strong picking the weak apart, cell by cell, to be consumed by the strong? Brilliant!"

"Vanity is a rusty key that was left lying about, and it was I alone who saw what it could unlock at this point in human history."

"It is true," Screwtape continues with a shrug, "that much of the groundwork was already laid. We had already convinced people of the rightness of destroying inconvenient life. Now they talk quite coolly of "blastocysts," and "clumps of cells" and "surplus embryos." My genius was to recognize that they needed just a little push to be convinced, with their mania for recycling, that by harvesting something that would otherwise be chucked out, they are doing a positive good! Think of it: They believe they occupy "the moral high ground." Oh, the profits for us — "

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Darknight613 said:
Which there certainly seemed to be in this case.

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the G-man said:
<span style="font-family:verdana;">I've always heard of </span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?tag=confederateya-20&path=tg/detail/-/0060652934/qid=1111678583/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14?v=glance&s=books&n=507846">The Screwtape Letters</a><span style="font-family:verdana;"> from C.S. Lewis and so far have never gotten the proverbial "</span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://www.quantumenterprises.co.uk/roundtuit/">round tuit</a><span style="font-family:verdana;">." Amazon's editorial review describes the book as:</span>
<blockquote style="font-style: italic; font-family: verdana;">"... the instructional correspondence between a senior demon, Screwtape, and his wannabe diabolical nephew Wormwood. As mentor, Screwtape coaches Wormwood in the finer points, tempting his "patient" away from God.

"Each letter is a masterpiece of reverse theology, giving the reader an inside look at the thinking and means of temptation. Tempters, according to Lewis, have two motives: the first is fear of punishment, the second a hunger to consume or dominate other beings." </blockquote><span style="font-family:verdana;">Meghan Cox Gurdon has an excellent adaptation of this story in </span><span style="font-style: italic;font-family:verdana;" >National Review Online</span><span style="font-family:verdana;"> called </span><a style="font-family: verdana;" href="http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/gurdon200503220755.asp">Screwtape Revisited</a><span style="font-family:verdana;"> that reminds us that the powerful aren't always right.</span><br /:<P><blockquote>"I have heard," Mildew begins, and blushes. "The fact is, Uncle, I have heard things that seem impossible. Is it really true that you have found a way to get them to eat — "<P>

" — their young?" Screwtape interrupts with a hungry smile.
"Yes. Yes! I have found the key, the key, my boy, to unlocking the worst in the human heart. Oh, massacres are entertaining enough, and reasonably productive. Rapine and thieving and savagery and the usual nonsense go a good distance to wrecking men's souls, but not in sufficient numbers. Not for us to win for good — that is, ha-ha, for ill. We must forever be stoking grievances, feeding pride, and constantly thrusting and parrying with the Enemy and his agents. No, the beautifully corrupting key that I have found is vanity."<P>"Appetites, yes, but eating their young, Uncle? I feel sure that I read somewhere that humans are naturally revolted by cannibalism. "<P>
Screwtape fixes his nephew with a shriveling glare. "We are not inducing them to broil the little tykes, dear boy, this is no fricassee of first-graders." He sighs heavily, a sufferer of fools, but then brightens, clearly distracted by a pleasing thought. "That's an idea, though. Must get Singer to write something up for me on that...excellent. Now, where — "
<P>
"Not broiling them." <P>"Yes. My achievement, the reason for this — " Screwtape gestures largely about the handsome apartment — "is that I have managed, by appealing to man's love of self, his vanity, to convince millions that it is not cannibalism, but progress, to turn tiny human infants into medicine. The strong picking the weak apart, cell by cell, to be consumed by the strong? Brilliant!"
<P>
"Vanity is a rusty key that was left lying about, and it was I alone who saw what it could unlock at this point in human history."
<P>
"It is true," Screwtape continues with a shrug, "that much of the groundwork was already laid. We had already convinced people of the rightness of destroying inconvenient life. Now they talk quite coolly of "blastocysts," and "clumps of cells" and "surplus embryos." My genius was to recognize that they needed just a little push to be convinced, with their mania for recycling, that by harvesting something that would otherwise be chucked out, they are doing a positive good! Think of it: They believe they occupy "the moral high ground." Oh, the profits for us — "</blockquote>

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rex said:
Is it me or is G-Man trying to derail this thread also?

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the G-man said:

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rex said:
Is it me or is G-Man trying to derail this thread also?

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It was a post about stem cells and embryos. How is that derailing a thread about stem cells and embryos?

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Animalman said:
Not really. Adult stem cells are far less pliable than embryonic stem cells. There isn't as much that can be done with them.

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There are currently several limitations to using adult stem cells. Although many different kinds of multipotent stem cells have been identified, adult stem cells that could give rise to all cell and tissue types have not yet been found. Adult stem cells are often present in only minute quantities and can therefore be difficult to isolate and purify. There is also evidence that they may not have the same capacity to multiply as embryonic stem cells do. Finally, adult stem cells may contain more DNA abnormalities—caused by sunlight, toxins, and errors in making more DNA copies during the course of a lifetime. These potential weaknesses might limit the usefulness of adult stem cells.
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Human embryonic stem cells are thought to have much greater developmental potential than adult stem cells. This means that embryonic stem cells may be pluripotent—that is, able to give rise to cells found in all tissues of the embryo except for germ cells rather than being merely multipotent—restricted to specific subpopulations of cell types, as adult stem cells are thought to be.

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Cloned Embryos Created to Match Stem Cells, Patients

By Karen Kaplan Times Staff Writer
Fri May 20, 7:55 AM ET

South Korean scientists have surmounted a key hurdle in stem cell research, reporting Thursday that they have produced 11 human embryo clones of injured or sick patients and harvested individualized stem cells — a template for creating therapeutic cells for anyone.

The experiment involved male and female patients ranging in age from 2 to 56 and produced stem cells much more efficiently than before, validating the technology's medical feasibility.

The findings were reported by the same team that produced the first human embryo clones last year.

If the process can be replicated in other labs, scientists said they could create individualized lines of stem cells to produce tissues suitable for transplants without running the risk of rejection.

Patient-specific lines of embryonic stem cells could be created to produce new heart muscle to repair the damage from a heart attack, for instance, or fresh brain tissue to treat stroke victims.

Researchers could also develop stem cell lines to study different types of cancer and genetic diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and juvenile diabetes.

"It just opens a floodgate of possibilities," said Fred H. Gage, a professor of genetics at the Salk Institute in La Jolla.

The researchers, who published their work in the online edition of the journal Science, insisted that their progress in cloning human embryos would not make things easier for anyone attempting to create a cloned baby, which they believe is impossible in any event.

"Reproductive cloning is not our goal," said Woo Suk Hwang, the lead researcher from Seoul National University. "Reproductive cloning is unsafe and unethical, and so it shouldn't be done in any country."

Hwang created human embryo clones last year using eggs and DNA from the same donors, all healthy women. This time, the donor eggs were mixed and matched with unrelated DNA from patients.

The researchers collected 185 eggs from 18 healthy women and removed the genetic material from the nucleus. They then took skin samples — about the size of a small button — from 11 patients with spinal cord injuries, juvenile diabetes and a form of severe combined immunodeficiency disease, the so-called bubble boy disease.

The researchers took DNA from the skin samples and inserted it into the eggs.

The procedure resulted in 31 embryos. When they were five days old, the embryos were transferred to culture dishes, where 11 of them from nine patients developed into stem cells.

Tests verified that the stem cells were able to multiply as well as differentiate into neurons, muscle, bone, cartilage, respiratory and islet cells, among others.

The researchers were able to produce a cell line using an average of 16.8 eggs. In their previous paper, they required 242 eggs to create a single line of stem cells.

Ian Wilmut, the Scottish scientist who led the team that cloned Dolly the sheep in 1996, called it a "remarkable improvement in efficiency" that marked "a very significant step forward."

Scientists said it was significant that the South Koreans were able to largely overcome a persistent problem with contamination that plagued stem cell lines.

A study this year by Gage and others found that human stem cells nourished by tissue from mice, calves and other animals had incorporated a type of acid that would trigger a harmful immune response if transplanted into humans.

Each of the advances reported in the paper is considered crucial to achieving the ultimate goal of customizing stem cells to treat individual patients, said Gerald Schatten, a biomedical researcher at the University of Pittsburgh and a coauthor of the study.

Researchers strongly suspect that tissues made from stem cells containing a patient's own genetic material are most likely to succeed in a transplant because there would be little danger of tissue rejection or other complications.

"This may be nature's best repair kit," said Schatten, who leads the Pittsburgh Development Center, a biology research institute.

But there is a range of genetic diseases that cannot be solved by simply growing new tissue from stem cells because they would contain the same defects that caused the disease.

Scientists, however, believe stem cells could be used to research other cures by illuminating "the cellular mechanisms that cause these diseases to occur," Gage said.

For instance, Gage envisions creating a line of stem cells using the DNA of a patient with pancreatic cancer.

"The embryonic stem cells don't have cancer, but they have the capacity for it," he said. "You could differentiate the cells into pancreatic cells and watch as the cancer develops."

Scientists could use the information to develop a treatment that might prevent cancerous tumors from forming. When they were ready to test it, they could apply it to the cells and "see if we can interfere with the progress of the disease," Gage said.

Wilmut and Dr. Christopher Shaw, a neurologist at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, are already making plans to collaborate with Hwang's research group to produce embryonic stem cells cloned from patients with motor neuron disease. They hope the cells will allow them to zero in on causes of the disease and to test drugs that might provide cures.

Schatten said Hwang was also collaborating with researchers at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York who focused on degenerative diseases such as Parkinson's.

"This work is powerful evidence that stem cell research can unlock the keys to understanding and eventually treating conditions from spinal cord injuries to diabetes," said Daniel Perry, president of the Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research.

Although 60% of Americans support embryonic stem cell research, according to a Gallup poll conducted this month, they remain uncomfortable with the idea of human cloning, with 87% of respondents calling it "morally wrong."

David Magnus, director of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics, who wrote an article accompanying the Science study, said Hwang's approach largely avoided serious ethical complications.

Scientists say the cloned embryos are incapable of growing into healthy babies because they don't go through all the steps that normally follow fertilization of an egg by a sperm.

"There's no reason to think any of these things could become a human being even if somebody wanted to," Magnus said.

He said that embryos produced through cloning had fewer ethical strings attached than embryos discarded from in vitro fertilization clinics, which have the potential to become babies.

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PaulWellr said:

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Cloned Embryos Created to Match Stem Cells, Patients

By Karen Kaplan Times Staff Writer
Fri May 20, 7:55 AM ET

South Korean scientists have surmounted a key hurdle in stem cell research, reporting Thursday that they have produced 11 human embryo clones of injured or sick patients and harvested individualized stem cells — a template for creating therapeutic cells for anyone.

The experiment involved male and female patients ranging in age from 2 to 56 and produced stem cells much more efficiently than before, validating the technology's medical feasibility.

The findings were reported by the same team that produced the first human embryo clones last year.

If the process can be replicated in other labs, scientists said they could create individualized lines of stem cells to produce tissues suitable for transplants without running the risk of rejection.



So that should end the opposition from the evangelical Christians.

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I was delighted to hear this news! I've been sitting around on my fat ass for 2 years waiting to have an organ transplant. If this works out, I could grow my own, have it implanted and have no rejection problem. No immune suppressant drugs to take for the rest of my life!

But I started thinking; rather than replace one vital organ, why not grow a whole new body and transplant my brain into it? Imagine having the body of a 15 year old and the mind of someone in their forties?

Sounds like a winner to me! The Christians can wait to get theirs in heaven, but I'll take mine now, thank you.

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Captain Sammitch said:
And always nice of you to toss in some kinda hook at the end!

Keep an eye out for those black 'copters, my man.

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WASHINGTON - In a stunning defection, Senate GOP leader Bill Frist broke with President Bush yesterday, urging more federal cash for stem-cell research and igniting a political showdown with the White House and social conservatives.

"It's not just a matter of faith, it's a matter of science," the Tennessee cardiologist said in a Senate speech. "I believe the President's position needs to be modified."

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) shot back, "Sen. Frist is a good man; he's simply advocating a bad policy."


Nancy Reagan, an outspoken backer of stem-cell research, said she was "heartened by Sen. Frist's support" for research with "potential to alleviate so much suffering."

White House officials complained that Frist, who plans to run for President in 2008, put Bush on the spot on a hot-button issue for his most ardent boosters, who will demand he keep his pledge to veto stem-cell legislation that Frist opposed until yesterday.

Frist also tripped up Bush's plan to take a bow for perhaps his best week of the second term, with victories on free trade, energy and transportation bills.

"This was quite a turnaround," a GOP strategist and close White House ally fumed. "He stepped on our message."

Though it's usually not wise to cross a President, a prominent Capitol Hill Bush ally called Frist's 180-degree turn a savvy political move.

"It's an attempt to identify himself as something other than a party functionary. It takes courage to go against a President, so that will help him," the ally said.

Scientists looking for easier and less controversial alternatives to stem cells from human embryos said yesterday that they'd found a potential source in placentas saved during childbirth.

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the G-man said:
STEM-CELL 'ALTERNATIVE' FOUND IN PLACENTA:

Scientists looking for easier and less controversial alternatives to stem cells from human embryos said yesterday that they'd found a potential source in placentas saved during childbirth.

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PCG342 said:
Then again, what do I know, eh?

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magicjay38 said:
Tell us how 'controversial' stem-cell research is when you're wasting away with Parkinson's or waiting for that organ tranplant.

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