Stem cells.. An appointment with chance
An accident with some chopsticks has led to an experimental medical treatment based on stem cells
"LIKE other fields of endeavour, science has fashions—and one of its most fashionable areas at the moment is the study of stem cells. This is a subject that provokes high passions, particularly when the cells in question are drawn from human embryos. It also encourages the lowest form of scientific behaviour, fabricating data (see article). A tragicomic stem-cell story, however, is probably a first. But a piece of research reported in this week's New England Journal of Medicine by Zhu Jianhong of Fudan University and his colleagues began that way. Its first subject was a woman admitted into Huashan Hospital in Shanghai with a chopstick in her brain. It ended triumphantly, though, with the trial of a treatment that may heal the sort of brain injuries that the woman in question suffered.
Stem cells are the cells responsible for making bodies, and then repairing the natural wear and tear to which they are subject while they are alive. The body-forming cells are the embryonic stem cells that are causing so much political trouble in America because obtaining them involves destroying early-stage embryos known as blastocysts. Some people think that destroying blastocysts is murder.
The repairing sort of cells, though, are uncontroversial, and are turning up in more and more places. Even tissues once believed not to change much after childhood, and thus not to need the renewing ministrations of stem cells, are yielding them. Heart-muscle tissue, for example, has recently been shown to have them.
Another place where they were not, at first, expected to exist is the brain. But they do. And that discovery meant that the unfortunate lady who had had a chopstick thrust through one of her eyes into part of her brain called the inferior prefrontal subcortex (IPS) presented an opportunity. When the utensil was removed, Dr Zhu decided to try culturing the tissue that came out with it, to see whether there were any stem cells there."
http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8348729
An accident with some chopsticks has led to an experimental medical treatment based on stem cells
"LIKE other fields of endeavour, science has fashions—and one of its most fashionable areas at the moment is the study of stem cells. This is a subject that provokes high passions, particularly when the cells in question are drawn from human embryos. It also encourages the lowest form of scientific behaviour, fabricating data (see article). A tragicomic stem-cell story, however, is probably a first. But a piece of research reported in this week's New England Journal of Medicine by Zhu Jianhong of Fudan University and his colleagues began that way. Its first subject was a woman admitted into Huashan Hospital in Shanghai with a chopstick in her brain. It ended triumphantly, though, with the trial of a treatment that may heal the sort of brain injuries that the woman in question suffered.
Stem cells are the cells responsible for making bodies, and then repairing the natural wear and tear to which they are subject while they are alive. The body-forming cells are the embryonic stem cells that are causing so much political trouble in America because obtaining them involves destroying early-stage embryos known as blastocysts. Some people think that destroying blastocysts is murder.
The repairing sort of cells, though, are uncontroversial, and are turning up in more and more places. Even tissues once believed not to change much after childhood, and thus not to need the renewing ministrations of stem cells, are yielding them. Heart-muscle tissue, for example, has recently been shown to have them.
Another place where they were not, at first, expected to exist is the brain. But they do. And that discovery meant that the unfortunate lady who had had a chopstick thrust through one of her eyes into part of her brain called the inferior prefrontal subcortex (IPS) presented an opportunity. When the utensil was removed, Dr Zhu decided to try culturing the tissue that came out with it, to see whether there were any stem cells there."
http://www.economist.com/science/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8348729
