stem cells

In the looking glass world of some conservatives and contrarians, the Democratic war on science continues today....just see here for proof. Not only has our new president reversed Bush's stem cell policy, and directed his science adviser--who really, really needs to be Senate confirmed--to "develop a strategy for restoring scientific integrity to government decision making" (something I and many others have called for). But in some ways better still, he has given a big speech about embryonic stem cell research that is scientifically accurate, cautious, and does not oversell its potential--…
O, wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in't! The Tempest is not only one of Shakespeare last plays, but arguably his most profound. No longer content with mere comedy or historical tragedy, he explores the changes rocking the Western world in the 17th century as superstition gave way to reason. By the closing of the fifth act, the sorcerer Prosper laments that "Now my charms are all o'erthrown, And what strength I have's mine own." And yet, four hundred years later, faith in magic and and distrust of science…
So, I have to say I find this funny. On the one hand we have the current, perverse attempt to forecast all the ways in which Democrats and scientists are going to fall into big conflicts soon, now that the Dems have so much power. The idea here is to construct a false equivalence between the egregious abuses of the Bush administration and a few potential conflicts of a very different nature that could maybe happen sometime in the future under this administration. Meanwhile, we have Obama about to stand up and, you know, liberate embryonic stem cell research. Jeez, Mr. President, didn't you…
It's almost like a bad Yakov Smirnoff joke, "In America you test therapies in animals before giving them to humans, in Russia..." All I can do is wonder, what were they thinking? Injecting stem cells into a kid's spinal fluid to correct a genetic disorder? Are they insane? Stem cells, in particular embryonic and fetal stem cells, are useful because they represent cells that are less differentiated than the cells that are working at specific functions throughout your body. Another result of being stem cells is that they are able to divide and proliferate without differentiating or…
As scientists await Obama reauthorizing federal funding of embryonic stem cell research and the FDA approves the first clinical trials using embryonic stem cell treatments, there is an important case report that highlights the potential safety issues with putting stem cells in humans. Amariglio et al. report a case in PLoS Medicine of a boy treated by spinal injections of fetal-derived stem cells for a developmental disorder called ataxia telangiectasia. Four years after treatment, the boy developed brain tumors. From the abstract: A boy with ataxia telangiectasia (AT) was treated with…
My latest Science Progress column is up: It makes the case that Stephen Colbert is the heir to Johnny Carson in terms of talk show promotion of science. It also includes various lame and stupid talking points that I made up and didn't use on the show, such as the following hypothetical Q&A responses: Didn't scientists start the "war" in the first place? Didn't they commit acts of aggression? Yes, if you mean by learning things. Why should I care about science? Because America is really good at it--much better than France. Is there really a "war" on science? Where are the bodies? Well,…
Here it is: */ The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c Obama's New Science Policy - Chris Mooney Colbert Report Full EpisodesColbert Report Tickets Paul McCartney AppearanceMore Funny Videos I'll have more to say about the whole experience in my next column....thanks to everyone who wrote in with positive words about the segment.
My latest Science Progress column is a response to Seed's interview with the outgoing science adviser. All I can say is wow, Dr. Marburger, you really don't get it, and maybe you never will. Either way, we Bush administration science critics remain entirely unimpressed with your inability to even properly characterize (much less answer) our arguments. And that wind of change that you might feel around you right now--we're part of it. You're not. You can read the full column here.
Over at What's New in Life Science, I have a post about embryonic stem cell research. Stop by and make Our Benevolent Seed Overlords happy.
While the talk about symbolism is important, a president actually has to do stuff. I've been hoping that somewhere there are a bunch of smart people figuring how to unfuck all the stuff that Little Lord Pontchartrain has fucked up using the power of the Executive Branch (here's one example)--hell, just coming up with a list of said fuckups would be a challenge. So I'm delighted to read this in the Washington Post: Transition advisers to President-elect Barack Obama have compiled a list of about 200 Bush administration actions and executive orders that could be swiftly undone to reverse…
Yesterday, I blogged about a recent article correlating a nation's research output related to human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) with its policies on hESC research. There was one particular source of uncertainty, though: As Levine points out, he didn't actually count papers that published results on hESCs, but papers that cited the original hESC paper. Therefore--as he once again acknowledges--he's actually counting papers related to hESC research. Therefore, his results are much more open to interpretation than they would be otherwise. This could be quite interesting, because his results…
The conclusion stated in the title of this post may seem painfully obvious, but a new study published in Cell Stem Cell by Aaron Levine (assistant professor at Georgia Tech and author of Cloning: A Beginner's Guide) backs it up with some hard data. To come to this conclusion, Levine compared a country's output of peer-reviewed publications from 1998 to 2006 related to human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) with it's overall biomedical science publication output during that period. As a control, he also compared these two values with the country's output of publications related to RNA…
tags: performance horses, polo, racing, tendon injury, stem cell research Beat Maendli on board Principal clears a fence during the dressage and show jumping Grand Prix in Aachen, Germany. Image: BBC. Have you read the featured story in last week's issue of Science News? It is a fascinating look at the use of stem cells to treat injuries to leg tendons of performance horses. This treatment looks like it is successful, although no controlled studies have been done because, as you might suspect, horse owners are loathe to subject their prized horses to a controlled study where their horse…
There's an article in the Washington Post by the chief officer of the AAAS and editor of 'Science' which can be summed up here: We simply cannot invest all our hopes in a single approach. Federal funding is essential for both adult and embryonic stem cell research, even as promising alternatives are beginning to emerge. I'm glad to see the editor of the journal which published one of the skin cell-turn-stem cell papers speak out on this issue, and be perfectly clear that this in no way vindicates the Bush administration's policy and vetos.
Michael Kinsley sums up the ethical inconsistency of the Blastocyst Liberationists: Third, although the political dilemma that stem cells pose for politicians is real enough, the moral dilemma is not and never was. The embryos used in stem-cell research come from fertility clinics, which otherwise would discard them. This has been a powerful argument in favor of such research. Why let these embryos go to waste? But a more important point is, What about fertility clinics themselves? In vitro fertilization ("test-tube babies") involves the purposeful creation of multiple embryos, knowing and…
Time has a great article about the recent breakthrough in stem cell research (that certain types of skin cells can regain pluripotency)--specifically on whether this so-called resolution to the stem cell debate might help the GOP. Stem cell research has been the albatross around the neck of Republicans for a while now. Its getting harder and harder to feign outrage over the moral ambiguity over a clump of cells, when thousands of Americans (who, unlike blastocysts, vote) die of varied diseases that may benefit from stem cell therapy. Bush's repeated vetoes of federal funding for embryonic…
Two weeks ago, on November 15th, researchers reported in the Journal of Translational Medicine (see citation below) that they had successfully isolated and characterized stem cells from menstrual blood. The researchers, Meng et al., were able to differentiate these cells--called Endometrial Regenerative Cells (ERCs)--into nine distinct cell types, and the stem cells displayed other encouraging characteristics (including rapid proliferation, unique expression of an embryonic stem cell marker, and particularly high production of certain growth factors and matrix metalloproteinases). These…
That could easily have been the shared title of a pair of articles in today's New York Times discussing the science and political implications of two very significant stem cell papers published online yesterday. The biggest offender was Sheryl Stolberg: It has been more than six years since President Bush, in the first major televised address of his presidency, drew a stark moral line against the destruction of human embryos in medical research. Since then, he has steadfastly maintained that scientists would come up with an alternative method of developing embryonic stem cells, one that did…
You guys might have noticed I've been quiet lately, that's because I've scheduled a thesis defense and am under deadlines. However, I couldn't let these two (1) papers(2) on reprogramming of human adult cells into stem cells slip by without some comment (NYT piece here) These reports are a follow-up on landmark animal studies that we discussed previously that showed that expressing 4 genes in cells obtained from adult animals you could induce them to form embryonic stem cell (ESC) like cells that researchers dubbed induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells). At the time we noted several…
tags: book review, biotechnology, biomedicine, stem cells, ethics, Cloning: A Beginner's Guide, Aaron Levine Would you drink milk from a cloned cow? Should we clone extinct or endangered species? Are we justified in using stem cells to develop cures? When will we clone the first human? Ever since Dolly the sheep was born, questions like these have been part of the public consciousness, and now, cloning is poised to revolutionize medicine, healthcare, and even the food we eat. Regardless of what certain politicians do to slow the progress of scientific research, cloning is here to stay, and…