Saturday, October 07, 2006
Breakthrough in adult stem cells
The term 'Kyoto Protocol' may acquire a new and much more positive meaning!
Shinya Yamanaka and Kazutoshi Takahashi, at Kyoto University, have developed a new and nearly magical recipe for turning your own skin cells into 'pluripotent' stem cells, which can be re-inserted into the body to re-grow bad tissues and organs. Their method already works in mice, so it should (but not necessarily must) work in humans.
The Yama-Taka method does not require any sort of contribution from embryos, so it has no ethical problems.
1. Start with a scraping of skin cells.
2. Use a virus to force certain DNA code segments into the cells. These DNA segments tell the skin cells to 'de-mature' into a much earlier and less specific type of cell.
3. Insert the unspecified but personal cells into the desired spot. [I didn't want to do surgery on Polistra, so I had her insert the cells in a cartoonish way, which obviously won't work in reality.]
4. The immature personal cells will pick up the chemical signals from the surrounding cells, and will grow into new and healthy specialized cells, replacing lost or damaged tissues.
Worth noting: the Japanese are obviously not affected by our federal funding limitations or our ethical debates. They've simply found a good solution.
If American researchers haven't pursued this line, it's not because of Bush's limitations; it's because of their own slowness ... or perhaps because they are anti-religious. The more promising course happens to be the one that doesn't kill embryos. American and European researchers seem to prefer the one that does kill embryos. Have to conclude that they enjoy 'having the issue' more than they enjoy solving the problem.
Shinya Yamanaka and Kazutoshi Takahashi, at Kyoto University, have developed a new and nearly magical recipe for turning your own skin cells into 'pluripotent' stem cells, which can be re-inserted into the body to re-grow bad tissues and organs. Their method already works in mice, so it should (but not necessarily must) work in humans.
The Yama-Taka method does not require any sort of contribution from embryos, so it has no ethical problems.
1. Start with a scraping of skin cells.
2. Use a virus to force certain DNA code segments into the cells. These DNA segments tell the skin cells to 'de-mature' into a much earlier and less specific type of cell.
3. Insert the unspecified but personal cells into the desired spot. [I didn't want to do surgery on Polistra, so I had her insert the cells in a cartoonish way, which obviously won't work in reality.]
4. The immature personal cells will pick up the chemical signals from the surrounding cells, and will grow into new and healthy specialized cells, replacing lost or damaged tissues.
Worth noting: the Japanese are obviously not affected by our federal funding limitations or our ethical debates. They've simply found a good solution.
If American researchers haven't pursued this line, it's not because of Bush's limitations; it's because of their own slowness ... or perhaps because they are anti-religious. The more promising course happens to be the one that doesn't kill embryos. American and European researchers seem to prefer the one that does kill embryos. Have to conclude that they enjoy 'having the issue' more than they enjoy solving the problem.
Labels: Ethics
¶ 11:07 PM
