| Embryonic
stem cells to create human tissue
Therapeutic cloning research
Sky News live
satellite link
Growing new tissue and organs - stem cell research - NEWS
Bone marrow and other tissues could repair your brain, spinal cord and heart and cure diabetes or old-age blindness. Adult stem cells promise investor returns while embryonic stem cells and therapeutic cloning raise major ethical, legal, and image problems. People with spinal cord injuries like Christopher Reeves could be treated successfully in future using adult stem cells as in animal studies - but has to be done soon after injury.
Dr Patrick Dixon
- Web TV, Global Change
Ltd
 Scientists
are growing human tissue from embryonic stem
cells, a spectacular advance with huge medical potential but
raising many ethical questions.
Web TV / Sky News comment below
by Dr Patrick Dixon on two studies by Dr James Thomson and Dr John
Gearhart on human embryonic stem cells, taken from before impantation.
These embryonic stem cells are growing forever in
the lab and are now being used to develop different human tissues
for medical treatments, implantation, transplant etc.
The same embryonic stem
cells could be genetically altered, and grown to make super
sperm or super eggs, or could be replaced back in the ball they
were taken from to make "improved" people.
UPDATE: Another team in Israel has claimed
that they have grown a miniature
human kidney in a mouse from human embryo cells - huge ethical
questions.
These advances and many others are part of a brave
new world described in FUTUREWISE
by Dr Dixon.
Whatever Next ?
What happens when these new steps are combined with
huge advances in human cloning
research? Some people are worried about dismembering a
small embryonic ball of stem
cells. They may prefer a new technique which inserts a
human nucleus into an egg from a cow (nuclear transfer). The
first human clone has been
made already by this method, and would be almost three years old
by now, except that it was destroyed at 32 cell stage. Now there
are claims that 3 babies have been cloned.
However all this will look very last century soon
following news that scientists have made liver cells from stem cells
found in the bone marrow of an afult. In other words, why
bother to clone an embryo when you can get the tissues you want
direct from cell cultures taken from your own body? Less "tacky",
less ethical minefields, better result all round.
,
Press
/ TV | Lectures | Dr
Patrick Dixon | Future of Banking | Digital Consumers
,
Genetics and Cloning | Life
& Health | Global Change
| Search our site |
