”When human beings in the weakest and most defenseless state of their existence are selected, abandoned, killed or used as pure ‘biological material,’ how can one deny that they are being treated not as ’someone’ but as ’something,’” he said.
Send in your stem cell questions by comment or email for a February (mid to late) Q & A.
Wow, while we are still waiting for that first ipsc therapy to come to be, and while we are still waiting for those promised embryonic stem cell cures, adult stem cells have done it again.
We learned earlier in the week that a rudimentary but beating heart has been generated in a University of Minnesota lab using a variety of adult stem cells from rats, which is awesome news because, if you’ll recall a previous post, while organ transplants may save lives, recipients have to contend with anti-rejection drugs with not-so-fun side effects for the rest of their lives.
Here come adult stem cells to save the day, again! The New England Journal of Medicine reports that there may be a way to “trick” the recipient’s body into accepting an organ by transplanting bone marrow from the organ donor to the organ recipient. This has been tried before with little success. This time around, Dr. David Sachs suppressed the immune system of a soon-to-be recipient. After transplantation, the recipient was given an infusion of the kidney donor’s bone marrow, in essence creating a new immune system in the recipient.
If this isn’t real hope, what is? For more real hope for hearts, read here.
Editing to add - oops, forgot I blogged about ipsc’s as applied to sickle cell anemia - still no therapy, but probably not too far off, no?
You may recall the post we ran not too long ago about TheraVitae and its founder Don Margolis. Well, Don now has his own blog and wow does he have some interesting thoughts and observations. Don doesn’t blog from a Catholic perspective, but those of us interested in the world of ethical stem cell research will find lots of food for thought and a first-hand account of what it’s like to pioneer an adult stem cell based bio-tech.
Don’s blog is: Adult Stem Cell Enlightenment
If you hadn’t noticed yet, after a long hiatus, Rebecca is blogging again over at Mary Meets Dolly. In unison, let us all let out a joyous, though somewhat contained and surely dignified . . . “YAY!”
Just in time for Lent! Wait, Valentine’s Day . . . that’s right. Buy a bottle of BOGO Rosso and a box of Two Hearts confections for your sweetheart on Valentine’s Day. This is a sweet indulgence you can feel really good about because each time you buy from BOGO, proceeds are donated to life-affirming adult stem cell research.
Check out Two Hearts Confections now!
Stemagen, a private embryonic stem cell lab based out of California, has claimed to have successfully produced five cloned embryos which developed into blastocysts. Some of these clones were generated from skin cells donated from Dr. Samuel Wood, a Reproductive Specialist and CEO of Stemagen. Eggs were donated from women undergoing ivf services at another California lab (apparently confident they would not need those eggs to produce their own babies). Stemagen hopes to repeat the process (essentially the same method Ian Wilmut used to create Dolly) so that patient matched (embryo-destructive) cells can be derived from the clones.
Stemagen’s motto is “Healing begins with a single cell”, yet nowhere do they list a single cure that their embryo-destructive processes and products have achieved. Stemagen exists to meet the self-perpetuating “need” for more and “new and improved” embryonic stem cell lines.
Of course, they are feeling the heat as we all know that an ethically satisticatory method of deriving patient-matched pluripotent cells exists. They need to produce now to keep their industry relevant. It’s interesting to see a little “in-fighting” as scientists vie to keep themselves important. Robert Lanza of Advanced Cell Technology, who is hoping to break into the no-embryo-destructive-research tide and recently reported that he can remove cells from embryos without destroying them, was semi-critical of Stemagen’s news, claiming that the quality of the clones was suspect.
See also Chelsea’s thoughts, here, Rebecca’s, here, and Dr. Beverly’s here - all worth your time, I promise!
You might remember that last year researchers from Advanced Cell Technology made big headlines by claiming to have been able to remove stem cells from human embryos without destroying the embryo in the process. We later found out, however, that ACT actually did end up destroying every embryo they used. Now it appears that they have really done it this time, created “several colonies” of ESCs without harming the embryos from which they were derived.
For some this is the answer the the ESC research dilemma, the embryonic life has been spared and the scientists still get their stem cells. But those who think so, just don’t get it. Mary Meets Dolly weighs in on the number of ways this method is still unethical:
1. It is unethical to create a human embryo in a dish
and treat it like a commodity, 2. Embryo biopsy is not always
successful and therefore still destroys embryos, if only part of the
time, and 3. What happens to the embryo after a piece of it is sucked out? Will it actually be implanted? Or does it go back in the deep
freeze?
An excellent assessment. It is not merely the destruction of the human embryo, but the very creation and use of innocent human life for scientific advantage that makes such research unethical. Not only is this human life exceptional because of its unique capacities in the natural order, but also because we know through Divine Revelation that human life is the “image and likeness” of an all powerful and ever living God. Such a life is profoundly sacred and should never become a scientific commodity, regardless of the theoretical benefits - benefits, btw, which may never come due to the un-tameable nature of these “early cells”.
P.S. Read more on the beating heart creation here and here
Grow a new one! Well, the science is not exactly there yet, for humans anyway:
Scientists have created a beating heart in the laboratory in a breakthrough that could allow doctors one day to make a range of organs for transplant almost from scratch.
The procedure involved stripping all the existing cells from a dead heart so that only the protein skeleton that created its shape was left. Then the skeleton was seeded with live progenitor cells, which multiplied and grew back over it, eventually linking together into a new organ. Such cells are involved in the formative stages of specialised types of tissue such as those found in the heart.
So far this has only been done with rats and pigs. And any research in humans is still likely years away. But come on, can any ESC researchers boast of such a breakthrough, even in animals?
H/T: Wesley Smith
Shelray and Leticia send in this article by Dr. Theresa Deisher, which recently appeared on Children of God for Life. She notes that Thompson and Yamanaka both chose - uneccessarily - to use genetic material from aborted fetuses. She comments:
Why have we been silent when there are alternatives to cells such as the HEK 293, made from an aborted fetus? Blockbuster drugs were developed, biomedical research made huge strides, and health care was transformed in the 21st century without the use of morally unacceptable cell lines and tissues. Within the past decade, the use of aborted fetal cell lines and tissues in drug discovery has become pervasive. Interestingly, Biotech Industry News recently published the fact that the lowest number of annual new drug approvals ever occurred in 2006. “The number of real innovations for diseases that never had a treatment before or drugs that are really better, there is just not much there. There just are not a lot of innovations lately” (Jordan, Newark Star-Ledger, 1/4/08). Obviously, scientific abrogation of morals has not yielded greater medical advances for humanity.
That’s her complaint about the method - now Deisher goes on to critique the results:
In essence, we are now able to take a perfectly good skin cell and turn it into a fatal tumor-forming cell. Is this really a ‘Victory’?
Okay, well . . . to start, Dr. Deisher concedes that IPSC’s can be produced in a moral way. That they were not is unfortunate, of course, but again, it’s an isolatable offense that need not be repeated - well, if we were not deeply steeped within a culture of death. It’s her second criticism, I think, that has more merit . . . yes, these induced pluripotent stem cells behave like embryonic stem cells — in both the anticipated good ways and of course, in at least one bad way. And this is one reason why some are refraining from jumping on the IPSC bandwagon and sticking to their stories about the promise and actual therapies and cures that have come from stem cells. But that, too, is no surprise.
The only “alternative sources” of pluripotent stem cells that have proven to be unproblematic or without some kind of ethical baggage or another, thus far, are cells taken from amniotic fluid.
