stem cells - Fausta's Blog

November 24, 2007 By Fausta

The End of the Stem-Cell Wars

As I posted last Wednesday, scientists have Induced Pluripotent Stem cells (iPS) to generate patient- and disease- specific stem cells. (Pluripotent means that the cells are capable of developing into any type of body tissue.)

This is a spectacular achievement. In today’s Weekly Standard (via Real Clear Politics) Ryan Anderson writes about The End of the Stem-Cell Wars:

Leading scientists are telling us that they can pursue the most promising stem cell research without using–much less killing–human embryos. This breakthrough enables researchers to create human embryonic stem cells directly from adult cells. In fact, the new method may actually prove superior to embryo-destructive alternatives. This is the biggest stem cell advance since James Thomson became the first scientist to isolate embryonic stem cells, less than a decade ago.

It is a new study by Thomson himself that has caused the present stir, but this time Thomson is not alone. Accounts of independent research by two separate teams of scientists were published on November 20–one in the journal Cell and one in the journal Science–documenting the production of pluri-potent human stem cells without using embryos or eggs or cloning or any morally questionable method at all.

The new technique is so promising that on November 16, Ian Wilmut announced that he would no longer seek to clone humans. Wilmut, you may remember, is the scientist who cloned Dolly the sheep. He recently sought and received a license from the British government to attempt to clone human embryos for research purposes. Now, citing the new technique, he has abandoned his plans.

Here’s what’s important:

The new technique produces patient-specific stem cells with all the benefits of stem cells from embryos, but without the production and destruction of human embryos or the use of human eggs.

Ryan Anderson explains how

Having political leaders of principle who insist on ethical standards in scientific research, then, is always of the utmost importance.

Go read it all.

November 21, 2007 By Fausta

Induced Pluripotent Stem cells (iPS) to generate patient- and disease- specific stem cells

Excellent news:

“By introducing four genes (OCT4, NANOG, SOX2 and LIN28), into human fibroblasts, stem cells sharing essentially all features of human ES cells were obtained,” Thomson’s team wrote in their report in Science.

“Similar to human embryonic cells, human iPS cells should prove useful for studying the development and function of human tissues, for discovering and testing new drugs, and for transplantation medicine,” added Thomson, whose team first discovered human embryonic stem cells in 1998.

While the technology is not yet ready for use in humans, it may mark the end of therapeutic cloning.

And that’s very good news.

February 9, 2007 By Fausta

Michael Fumento’s article on amniotic stem cells

Yesterday I got an email from Michael where he writes,

Adult stem cells cure and treat more 70 diseases and are involved in almost 1,300 human clinical trials. Scientists also keep discovering that adult stem cells are capable of creating a wider variety of mature cells. Perhaps the most promising of these was announced in the January issue of Nature Biotechnology.

Read Michael’s latest article, Code of Silence: Another source of useful stem cells has been found – and the media and the cloning crowd are trying keep it quiet

Anthony Atala, director of the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, reported that stem cells in the amniotic fluid that fills the sac surrounding the fetus may be just as versatile as embryonic stem cells. At the same time they maintain all the advantages that have made adult stem cells such a success.

This has caused great consternation on the part of those seeking increased taxpayer embryonic stem cell funds. The reason is that there are currently no practical applications for this type of cell. There hasn’t even been a single clinical trial involving them. Researchers admit we won’t have approved embryonic stem cell treatments for at least 10 years.

Read very word of Michael’s article.

The fact is that while we are spending millions on dollars on embryonic stem cells, the real results are elsewhere – in the other types of stem cells.

Update, Saturday, 11 February: More exciting news – A J Strata explains:

What this means to us laymen is we now have the “on-off” switch that turns adult stem cells into some of their target cell types, in this case blood cells (or bone marrow cells). The use of adult stem cells is always preferred due to the genetic match with the patient. And finding this trigger outside the DNA (which is where I would have expected it to be, honestly) is a huge leap ahead. Now scientist will culture a vast number of tailored stem cells from the patient and know how to trigger them to make blood and marrow. It is probable this mechanism is valid for all stem cell control, so what will be left is to find the proper triggers for each cell type. Each target cell type, for example a neuron, is the product of different kinds and mixes of protein production. It would seem normal for each specific mix to have a combination of triggers that make the stem cell transform into the target type.

All speculation based on the apparent breakthrough. But reasonable speculation.

We live in the age of wonders.

February 9, 2007 By Fausta

Propaganda on the news, and today’s other items

Propaganda in the news:
Voice of America or voice of Ahmadinejad?

After a Senate subcommittee hearing last summer in which an escaped Iranian dissident testified that the U.S. itself has been beaming anti-American propaganda into Iran, Sen. Tom Coburn began looking into the problem. Today, in a polite but searing letter, addressed to President Bush, Coburn spelled out his concerns that American broadcasts into Iran, via Radio Farda and Voice of America, freighted with content that sounds like the propaganda of Tehran itself, “may actually be harming American interests rather than helping.”

Global Warming Smear

political and media activists attempt to stigmatize anyone who doesn’t pay homage to their “scientific consensus.”
…
Here are the facts as we’ve been able to collect them. AEI doesn’t lobby, didn’t offer money to scientists to question global warming, and the money it did pay for climate research didn’t come from Exxon.

Speaking of “climate change”, The Economist

The other part of the report’s job is to make predictions about what will happen to the climate. In this, it illustrates a curious aspect of the science of climate change. Studying the climate reveals new, little-understood, mechanisms: as temperatures warm, they set off feedback effects that may increase, or decrease, warming. So, as understanding grows, predictions may become less, rather than more, certain. Thus the IPCC’s range of predictions of the rise in the temperature by 2100 has increased from 1.4-5.8°C in the 2001 report to 1.1-6.4°C in this report.

That the IPCC should end up with a range that vast is not surprising given the climate’s complexity. But it does leave plenty of scope for argument about whether it is worth trying to do anything about climate change.

As far as global warming goes, send me some. It’s been below 30F for an entire week here and I need to shed the Polartec and the tweeds.

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When You Tax Profits, You Tax People (emphasis added)

The prevailing 35 percent corporate tax rate takes a monster bite from all U.S. businesses. Moreover, our business taxes are far too high in relation to the rest of the world. Believe it or not,the corporate tax rate is lower in France than it is in the United States.

Along with slow-growing Japan, the U.S. has the highest marginal tax rate on corporate profits of any of the developed countries. Think of this: Germany is cutting its corporate tax rate to 15 percent from 25 percent. And if frontrunner Nicolas Sarkozy wins the French presidential election this spring, he plans to slash France’s corporate tax burden. Meanwhile, we’ll still be taking our best companies behind the barn and shooting them.

The bottom line here is that our economic system is all about free-market capitalism, and at the core of that system is profit. Profit isn’t a dirty word. From profits spring the abundance of this great country. Profits are the mother’s milk of stocks and the economy. Expanding profits provide businesses the resources to enlarge production operations and hire additional workers. This, in turn, is how incomes are created, wages that are then spent by American families.

Why can’t liberals grasp this?

Because it won’t fit their script?

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Hillary
Imagining a Triangulator-in-Chief: Hillary Rodham Clinton

P.J. O’Rourke recently said Hillary’s “Hugo Chavez in a pants suit.” Should Hillary wear skirts? Donatella thinks

They make her look too masculine

In Hillary’s mind, “and that is wrong because?”

She’ll have to lose a few pounds and wear shorter jackets, to look better in skirts. This is what she looked like in a skirt years ago.

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In a lighter mode,
Affairs to Forget. How Hollywood lost its romantic groove.
Here’s my second-favorite movie,

They don’t make them as they used to, don’t they?

January 15, 2007 By Fausta

"X" men, and other items

What about “+” signs?
Via Beth, Will Saudis Ban the Letter ‘X’?

The letter “X” soon may be banned in Saudi Arabia because it resembles the mother of all banned religious symbols in the oil kingdom: the cross.

Read the article – I”m not the only one asking about “+”.

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Miracles Appear in the Strangest of Places

Last year’s remarks by Pope Benedict XVI might just have signaled a watershed event in the global struggle against those who are most willing to use that sword.

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More reasons to blame Bush: Economists upgrade US outlook after surprisingly strong data

Lehman Brothers chief US economist Ethan Harris on Friday boosted his forecast for fourth quarter 2006 growth to an annualized rate of 3.3 percent, a leap from the firm’s prior call for just 2.0 percent growth.

Also via Dr Sanity, War? – What War?

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Via Larwyn,
Liberal Blogs Attack Conservative Radio Station

US Rep. Ellison Uniquely Positioned To Launch Bush Impeachment Effort

V2K, Baby: Tinfoil Hat Brigades (Literally!) Form Support Groups. I woke up in the middle of the night a couple of weeks ago when the clock radio malfunctioned and there is a late-night radio talk show where people that believe in this stuff call in. Very strange.

MSNBC: Blames Jew Lobby for Carter’s Mental Illness Update Deceit, Dysnfuction And The Dance Of The LeftMoney quote:

The terror that has become an acceptable form of political expression has never been about a religious endeavor. It is the misuse of a religion, a calculated attempt to realign a religion to serve the needs of a few evil men. It is an effort that is succeeding, because there are people that are chained and in servitude and their willing, desperate search for an escape from their dark medieval prisons.

Terror organizations and terror supporters are using our own language to defeat us. Suicide bombers and terrorists are now ‘military factions,’ while those that plan and pay for the crimes are now referred to as ‘political factions’ – as if patterning themselves after legitimate political organizations will somehow camouflage their identity and objectives. Ever dutifully, the media parrots these ridiculous assertions as credible.

How many people will the peace movement kill this time? Part II.

Iran smog kills 3,600 in a month

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Via Irwin, Two Alliances
President Bush has managed to divide and conquer the Middle East

When the Bush administration came into office, only Egypt and Jordan were functioning allies of the U.S. Iran and Iraq were already declared enemies, Syria was hostile, and even its supposed friends in the Arabian peninsula were so disinclined to help that none did anything to oppose al Qaeda. Some actively helped it, while others knowingly allowed private funds to reach the terrorists whose declared aim was to kill Americans.

The Iraq war has indeed brought into existence a New Middle East, in which Arab Sunnis can no longer gleefully disregard American interests because they need help against the looming threat of Shiite supremacy, while in Iraq at the core of the Arab world, the Shia are allied with the U.S. What past imperial statesmen strove to achieve with much cunning and cynicism, the Bush administration has brought about accidentally. But the result is exactly the same.