Stem Cell Research

[lorelei]

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As for becoming two people, I think that's not such a difficult matter. As the splitting occurs and one body of cells that was once part of one whole becomes a separate entity that is alive, multiplying, and fully capable of developing into a separate human individual - I would call that a separate human being. If you want to say that the soul enters at this point of division, that's fine.

When does the soul enter if there isn't a division?

As for the melding, that's a bit more complicated, but I suspect that you don't have 50-50 melds. I suspect that once you have a genetically distinct tissue meld onto another, one resigns (i.e. dies) and becomes one of those "twin embryos" people have in their ovary or somewhere embedded in the body, while the other continues to develop to a baby.

Whether there are exact 50-50 melds, I don't know (it wouldn't be possible to count all the cells in a grownup or even a baby!) but there are certainly people who are chimeras, with both cell lines making significant contributions to the working cells in their bodies. This Wikipedia article is easy to read and has several cites to the medical literature:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimera_(genetics)

(It's a really interesting phenomenon, actually; if the two zygotes that combine have different sex chromosomes you frequently end up with hermaphroditism.)

 

[abj]

Where, for example? Care to post some links of prominent debates at, say, prominent medical schools, NIH symposia, the US Congress?

http://www.bioethics.gov/

The President's Council on Bioethics

"President Bush today named 17 leading scientists, doctors, ethicists, social scientists, lawyers, and theologians to serve on the President's Council on Bioethics. "

President Clinton had a similar council when he was in office.

This was tremendously in the news back in 2001 with Bush's decision and the ongoing discussions throughout 2002 and onward.

 

[mercaptovizadeh]

When does the soul enter if there isn't a division?



Whether there are exact 50-50 melds, I don't know (it wouldn't be possible to count all the cells in a grownup or even a baby!) but there are certainly people who are chimeras, with both cell lines making significant contributions to the working cells in their bodies. This Wikipedia article is easy to read and has several cites to the medical literature:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimera_(genetics)

(It's a really interesting phenomenon, actually; if the two zygotes that combine have different sex chromosomes you frequently end up with hermaphroditism.)

Fertilization.

As for chimeras, that's a difficult question. I don't know enough about them to pass judgement and claim that things are one way or another. It is tempting to say that the line that gives rise to the head would be the one that survived, whereas the other, as a spiritual entity, died. But I simply don't know.

 

[lorelei]

Fair enough. Thank you for the discussion! I appreciate you taking the time to answer my questions.

 

[LJDHC05]

Given the current administrative policy, the vast majority of stem cell work will be done outside of the US and the NIH will have no say over how the work is done. All the US is managing to do is not have a role or a say in the advancement of this field, and box itself out of any market potential.

Yeah, that's a shame. Especially after the SCNT scandal in Nature from the South Koreans. I spend 3 years in a lab and have to go through a few months of peer revisions to get a paper into a mid-level journal, when all I really needed was a graphic arts degree and a copy of photoshop to publish in Nature. Not to belittle foreign science, but some of the foreign articles that I've had the pleasure to read are just poorly done science translated by Babelfish into English and thrown into good journals for the sake of being breaking news.

And then what happens after that crappy foreign work is published in a clinical study on human guinea pigs in some half-baked clinical trial with made up results? Some stupid pharmaceutical company buys out the cell line, and pays off the FDA to rush approval of the treatment procedure after an abbreviated american clinical trial and we end up with a bunch of patients dead of total body tumors while the pharmaceutical company advertises it on TV. Sounds like exactly the sort of thing that we need to happen in American medicine!!!

This kind of work needs to be done well and done carefully in the US.

 

[thinknofu3]

This kind of work needs to be done well and done carefully in the US.

I completely agree - but for entirely separate reasons. This work needs to be done in the US so that when successful treatments are developed (and I believe they can be), they are accessible to Americans. If successful treatments are developed in foreign countries first, two things concern me: 1) other governments could potentially hold them over the US government's head, looking to charge exorbitant prices or gain political capital (similar, but not the same as what's happening now with Tamiflu), or 2) bureaucratic or political barriers in the US - namely the "non-partisan" FDA - could keep those treatments from US citizens. This has happened before, and in a sense is still happening now with the "morning-after pill" RU-486 (which has repeatedly been shown to be both safe and effective) - it was first prescribed in Europe in 1981, but Americans couldn't get it until 2000 for what were ultimately political reasons. I'd hate to see that happen for a treatment for Alzheimer's, Parkinsons' or some other debilitating disease or condition.

 

[Lindyhopper]

To the OP, I'm truly sorry to hear about your father.
Best wishes.

I think that whenever you have a body of cells that can independently resolve into an adult human being in the ordinary context of the uterus, that body of cells consitututes Life. This is in contrast to the cells in your adult hand which have life, because these cells, once shorn off your hand, will die. Same goes with sperm and egg cells. . ..

This position has the benefit of a simple clarity, that gives it's advocates a clear certainty in their beliefs. I don't believe, however, that makes it true. A single fertilized ovum is diffrent from a human being.

Merc. is quick to distinguish the fertilized ovum for somatic cells. But, as Dolly showed, somatic cells can be transfected into blastocysts & grown into adults. Consider the Nature article culturing mouse spermagonia. They differenates into the three germ layers. Presumably they hope to develop it into different tissue types. But they also transfected spermagonia into the blastocysts. Conceivably they could also just clone a new individual.

At the risk of creating a straw man, I think the argument comes down to that ESC could develop into a new individual in the "ordinary context of the uterus". But these are cells fertilized outside the body, with the intention of being cultured into different tissues.

 

[Stroganoff]

Partially correct. Adult SC research may hold promise, ESC is just scientific garbage. They haven't even solved the immunologic organ rejection problem, and now they hope to transfer ESCs from one person to another and have a whole other organ grow?

Would it be ethical to remove an ESC from an embryo and store it for that person's future use? Current people are screwed, but future generations might have this option. Would this inhibit implantation into the uterus? You or someone else mentioned (on page 1?) that no parents today would opt to have a cell removed from their embryo--what if it's removed for future use of their child later in life? No host rejection to deal with.

My second question is general. Isn't ESC research legal in the US? I was under the impression that it's only illegal to use federal funding on ESC research, but state and private funding can be used. California and Michigan or Minnesota and some other states are leading this.

 

[jonathon]

Most of the posters on this message thread really have no clue to what they are talking about in regards to Embryonic Stem (ES) cell research. There have been ZERO clinical trials done yet with ES cells that have shown the ability to cure anything. All of the news you hear about with stem cell research for neuroregeneration and replacement therapy deals with ADULT stem cells. There are currently over 100 diseases being treated with adult stem cells.

Some posters are talking about making a stem cell line with not harming the blastocyst. This right here shows the lack of knowledge among posters on this thread. One of the alternative methods for obtaining ES cells from the blastocyst without killing the blastocyst is by freezing the blastocyst at day 5 of human development and then deactivating a gene called Cdx2. When this gene is inactivated it prevents implantation from occurring. Therefore, a scientist can deactivate the Cdx2 gene and freeze the embryo and take one ES cell out and then having a 7- cell embryo at day 5 of development instead of an 8-cell embryo and then reactivate the Cdx2 gene so implantation can occur. Even with taking this one ES cell out to make a new cell line is NOT known if it harms later development. Even by taking the one cell out to make a new cell line is still preventing the potential for life to develop. When an embryo is frozen, there is a HUGE risk for genetic mutations to occur and certain genes to become methylated when the gene should be activated by transcriptional factors for development.

I'm pointing this information out because as a student scientist I will be doing research with ES cells to learn how birth defects develop during development as my future research.

There is currently NO way to obtain an ES cell at the blastocyst stage of development and not harming for the potential of life to develop.

There is not as huge of a push among scientists as many of you might think for running to the field of stem cell research. Many scientists are actually afraid to go into the field of stem cell research because of how hard it is to get funding, all of the ethical issues that come with stem cell research, and for those who want to do ES cell research have to buy all of their lab equipment by private funding. Even the building they work in has to be privately funded.

I could write several pages in length with ES cell information but I will only say what I have posted above.

 

[jonathon]

You mean in the journal Science and not Nature.

This work is being well done and slow. It's the media who trys to push the current research results into the clinical setting. Researchers are a good decade or more away from being confident with introducing ES cells into clinical settings.

Since you don't even know the correct journal where the South Korea scandel took place I won't even go into the details about it. There was NO way possible for any person to detect fraud confidently at the time the article was published. The average Science biological article takes froughly 90 days of review. This article was rushed and not throughly investigated before being published. But still no person could have even caught fraud at the time the paper was submited. It took an anomounous email to a local South Korea newspaper before anyone even was able to detect any fraud. His work was done by IVF.



QUOTE=LJDHC05]Yeah, that's a shame. Especially after the SCNT scandal in Nature from the South Koreans. I spend 3 years in a lab and have to go through a few months of peer revisions to get a paper into a mid-level journal, when all I really needed was a graphic arts degree and a copy of photoshop to publish in Nature. Not to belittle foreign science, but some of the foreign articles that I've had the pleasure to read are just poorly done science translated by Babelfish into English and thrown into good journals for the sake of being breaking news.

And then what happens after that crappy foreign work is published in a clinical study on human guinea pigs in some half-baked clinical trial with made up results? Some stupid pharmaceutical company buys out the cell line, and pays off the FDA to rush approval of the treatment procedure after an abbreviated american clinical trial and we end up with a bunch of patients dead of total body tumors while the pharmaceutical company advertises it on TV. Sounds like exactly the sort of thing that we need to happen in American medicine!!!

This kind of work needs to be done well and done carefully in the US.[/QUOTE]

 

[jonathon]

It's currently not ethical to remove an ES cell from an embryo by patient consent for future use. The goal is to obtain patient specific ES cells. This work is trying to be done with the use of adult stem cells and an ES cell. Research has shown that adult stem cells can be tricked into behaving the same as ES cells by turning the genes on in adult stem cells that are needed for development and other regulating activities that ES cells do and turning the genes of that are needed for specific function in an adult stem cell.

Would it be ethical to remove an ESC from an embryo and store it for that person's future use? Current people are screwed, but future generations might have this option. Would this inhibit implantation into the uterus? You or someone else mentioned (on page 1?) that no parents today would opt to have a cell removed from their embryo--what if it's removed for future use of their child later in life? No host rejection to deal with.

My second question is general. Isn't ESC research legal in the US? I was under the impression that it's only illegal to use federal funding on ESC research, but state and private funding can be used. California and Michigan or Minnesota and some other states are leading this.

 

[jonathon]

An American scientist can patent a stem cell that they bring in from another country. The fear among USA scientists is not that other counties develop new treatments and be able to cure a disease with an adult stem cell (which has occured in the United States with the use of adult stem cells), it's that the American scientsits will loose being the leaders in stem cell research.

I completely agree - but for entirely separate reasons. This work needs to be done in the US so that when successful treatments are developed (and I believe they can be), they are accessible to Americans. If successful treatments are developed in foreign countries first, two things concern me: 1) other governments could potentially hold them over the US government's head, looking to charge exorbitant prices or gain political capital (similar, but not the same as what's happening now with Tamiflu), or 2) bureaucratic or political barriers in the US - namely the "non-partisan" FDA - could keep those treatments from US citizens. This has happened before, and in a sense is still happening now with the "morning-after pill" RU-486 (which has repeatedly been shown to be both safe and effective) - it was first prescribed in Europe in 1981, but Americans couldn't get it until 2000 for what were ultimately political reasons. I'd hate to see that happen for a treatment for Alzheimer's, Parkinsons' or some other debilitating disease or condition.

 

[jonathon]

To the original poster:

Don't go into some interview sounding sorry for what took place with your dad. You need to look at the issue for the whole masses and not just one individual. It will look worse on you to talk about going into ES cell research just because your dad was injured then it would if you went into ES cell research because you want to help in the understanding of knowing how to regenerate damaged spinal cords. Current research with adult stem cells is not known if adult stem cells acutally do regenerate the dagamed tissue or if the adult stem cells are able to regenerate the damaged cells that present in the tissue.

I have had two family memebers die from Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis and I never use that as a reason why I"m going to do research with ES cell in learning how birth defects development during embryological development.

To the OP, I'm truly sorry to hear about your father.
Best wishes.



This position has the benefit of a simple clarity, that gives it's advocates a clear certainty in their beliefs. I don't believe, however, that makes it true. A single fertilized ovum is diffrent from a human being.

Merc. is quick to distinguish the fertilized ovum for somatic cells. But, as Dolly showed, somatic cells can be transfected into blastocysts & grown into adults. Consider the Nature article culturing mouse spermagonia. They differenates into the three germ layers. Presumably they hope to develop it into different tissue types. But they also transfected spermagonia into the blastocysts. Conceivably they could also just clone a new individual.

At the risk of creating a straw man, I think the argument comes down to that ESC could develop into a new individual in the "ordinary context of the uterus". But these are cells fertilized outside the body, with the intention of being cultured into different tissues.

 

[jonathon]

Obviously you are not aware of the recent developments of genetically modifying ES cells so they do have the antigens on them when transplanted so they are not rejected by the immune system. In regards to transplantation that has occurred with adult stem cells being transplanted into the damaged heart muscles, scientists have genetically engineered the stem cells so they have the MHCI and MHCII, etc, antigens on them so they are not rejected and have the ability to either regenerate the damaged cells or replace them all together. Current research does now show if the adult stem cells regenerate the damaged cells in the damaged tissue area or if the adult stem cells are able to replace the damaged cells.

Scientists have come a long way in being able to control stem cells when transplanted into a tissue in the last year.

Partially correct. Adult SC research may hold promise, ESC is just scientific garbage. They haven't even solved the immunologic organ rejection problem, and now they hope to transfer ESCs from one person to another and have a whole other organ grow?

 

[Lindyhopper]

New Scientist
May 29, 06
A team of US researchers has discovered the “home” of stem cells in the heart, lending credence to the idea that the heart has the capacity to repair itself. The finding raises the possibility that these cardiac stem cells could one day be manipulated to rebuild tissues damaged by heart disease – still the leading cause of death in the US and UK.

Because fully developed heart cells do not divide, experts have believed the organ was unable to regenerate after injury. But, in 2003, researchers at Piero Anversa’s laboratory at New York Medical College in Valhalla, New York, US, discovered stem cells in the hearts of mice, and subsequently humans. However, they still did not know whether these stem cells actually resided in the heart or had merely migrated there from another tissue, such as bone marrow.

So Anversa’s colleague Annarosa Leri began to look for tell-tale “niches” of stem cells in the heart, such as a cluster of undifferentiated cells paired with the requisite “nurse” cells – vital for stem cell growth and development.

Using adult mice as a model, she located cardiac stem cell niches, which were especially abundant in the heart's atria. She found the stem cells clustered together with more mature heart cells in niches between cardiac muscle cells.

Ultimate goal
Leri and her colleagues have now removed tiny numbers of cardiac stem cells from people undergoing heart operations, grown them in the lab and then transplanted them into the damaged hearts of rats and mice.

The results are promising, says Leri, and may eventually give better heart-healing results than bone-marrow derived stem cells. “We think that these are the cells that normally provide new heart tissue and will most likely be better suited for repair of diseased hearts,” she says.

But the ultimate goal is to understand how cardiac stem cells really work, says Stephen Minger, director of the Stem Cell Biology Laboratory at King’s College London, UK, who was not involved in the research.

“If these cells truly do exist we would like to be able to find out what regulates their activity and whether you can simulate that mechanism to repair heart tissue without having to use cells from elsewhere,” he says.

Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0600635103)