Trading Parkinson's for Brain Cancer
Nature has a report up about an attempt to cure Parkinson's using human embryonic stem cells (in rats)."The positive results were really remarkably strong," Goldman says. "The animals exhibited almost a complete restoration of normal function."
But there could be alarming side effects. Each stem-cell transplant also contained cells that had failed ( Read more... )
But there could be alarming side effects. Each stem-cell transplant also contained cells that had failed ( Read more... )
Then the article lied. Or your definition of "have a clue" is a lot more generous than mine. "We had to kill the rats because otherwise the results would have totally embarrassed us" does not equal "have a clue" in my book.
They are saying several years before clinical trials can proceed. It can easily be more than ten years before FDA approval.
Which is not what the pro human ESC people say in public (see Michael J. Fox stem cell ads from this election).
They're headed that way; note that the animal stem cells are grown on a scaffold of human fetal cells.
Which is insane. They're bringing up the possibility of immune reactions, and problems between incompatible hormones. For what? The ability to piss off pro-lifers?
Get it working in animals, with animal ESCs. Find the relevant genes. Then map it to humans.
We went from 0 to the moon in 10 years
Yep, and because it was a political glory shot, we then ended up leaving it.
50 years after JFK made his challenge, 40 years after we landed there, we won't be there.
That's what happens when you elevate political results over scientific and engineering reality. :-(
and from 0 to the human genome in 5 (IIRC).
No. As the Wikipedia article notes:The $3-billion project was formally founded in 1990 by the United States Department of Energy and the U.S. National Institutes of Health, and was expected to take 15 years... [A] 'rough draft' of the genome was finished in 2000... Ongoing sequencing led to the announcement of the essentially complete genome in April 2003, five years earlier than planned. In May 2006, another milestone was passed on the way to completion of the project, when the sequence of the last chromosome was published in the journal Nature.
Despite all the popular press articles saying that the genome was "complete", as of 2003 it is still incomplete and it clearly won't be finished for many more years
I'm at UCSC. We're still releasing new, changed assemblies of the Human Genome.
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