News in a nutshell
| 13 September, 2010 | Adie Chan |
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ESC funding flip flop
Wikimedia commons, Nissim Benvenisty
The embryonic stem cell community is in a bit of a frenzy as last Tuesday the court initially upheld its decision to ban federal funding for the research, and then just 2 days later suspended the funding freeze until it has time to further consider the case. In the meantime, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is “scrambling” to fund those grant proposals involving human embryonic stem cells (hESCs), according to ScienceInsider.
Break for seed bank
A world-renowned Russian seed bank at risk due to a court’s recent decision to allow housing development on the site received a break last week when the Russian Housing Development Foundation decided to postpone auctioning off the land with forage plants until October, according to ScienceInsider.
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Why not concentrate on adult stem cells, which have already produced many successes, while the embryonic, none, but have instead resulted in tumors.
1) Why not letting other stem cell avenues (ESC, iPSP, etc) to be fully explored and studied given that adult stem cells have produced many successes?. Are we giving up on scientific challenges? Are the challenges presented by ESC (tumor formation) insurmountable? Has America been a country of quitters?.
2) Because two researchers are concerned about competition (in spite of the many successes of adult stem cell), is the rest of the country going to throw the towel?. The argument could be applied to many areas of research and development. That is not the way America has been historically built.
Judith: Adult reprogrammed stem cells do bear some differences from embryonic stem cells, such as epigenetic markers. Furthermore, there is nothing in this recent debacle that does anything for or against adult stem cell research. Even if we do happen to eventually turn to adult stem cells for therapeutic purposes, embryonic stem cell research is still essential. The danger of creating tumors is not limited to embryonic stem cells, adult stem cells also have that danger.
I’m not aware of the supposedly great successes of adult stem cells either, in comparison.
I agree with Judith Goldsberry completely on this issue. While embryonic stem cells hold great promise for generating many types of tissue for clinical use, there are many ethical and technical barriers to overcome first, tumorigenicity notwithstanding. Adult stem cells on the other hand have fewer such barriers and hold such great promise for clinical use that the IP should have high priority for translation to the clinic as soon as possible. It is in my view unethical to do anything else.
That “adult stem cells have fewer such barriers” has to be yet fully proven and validated. It appears as if, so far, adult stem cell research has had higher priority, at least in terms of funding. I also think it is unethical not to continue to test, prove and validate everything else.
This is all crap! All that uneducated cretinish stuff about “killing babies”
I very much agree with Vann. Its all crap and totally unscientific to talk only about the ethics of using embryos for deriving ES lines. How does it matter if the surplus or defective embryos are properly utilized for some research purposes rather than letting them go to the discard bin…same argument goes for using any discarded human tissue parts…ofcourse we need regulations to enforce getting informed consents and institutional monitoring of research through IRBs and IECs….so let us talk about the challenges ahead and the things that need to be explored…i guess many field of science started from nowhere with all of unknowns to total success….and am sure ES/iPS research is also in that path and the research community, legal bodies and the general public has to be patient to let the science bloom on it own pace and not expect miracle happen in no time…it is the quest for truth and an exploration for possible application that drives a basic science….let us all laud the notion and not curb it while it is still sprouting….if our predicessors were only talking of ethics, the entire field of medicine and surgery would not have evolved…just recollect how human experiments were conducted on prisinors of war in the past, both illegally and unethically….but am sure thay have all added to the wealth of information we have and enjoy today….am sure everyone including the ethical proponents and the FDA want any medicine or a method to be tested enough before even going for animal testing leave alone the series of human trial that they have to pass before it gets approved and enter into the routine practice…so let us do science keeping ethics in mind but not totally compromise the essence of science just for the sake of ethics. And both ES and adult stem cell research has to go hand in hand to understand and utilize them both effectively.