Category ►►► Future of Medicine

April 11, 2007

Bloody Cheek

I stand foresquare for scientific progress, particularly in the field of medicine (I want to live forever)... and most particularly for the hot field of stem-cell research. I have no moral qualms about even embryonic stem-cell research, especially when the stem cells are extracted without destroying the embryo that contains them; and I have argued the point rather forcefully.

But it's bloody awful and a bloody shame that the Times of London has just been caught with its knickers down, defending embryonic stem-cell research by pointing to a new miracle cure... brought about by adult stem-cell research.

They've got some bloody cheek!

I refer to this passage in the story:

Diabetics using stem-cell therapy have been able to stop taking insulin injections for the first time, after their bodies started to produce the hormone naturally again....

Previous studies have suggested that stem-cell therapies offer huge potential to treat a variety of diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and motor neuron disease. A study by British scientists in November also reported that stem-cell injections could repair organ damage in heart attack victims.

But research using the most versatile kind of stem cells -- those acquired from human embryos -- is currently opposed by powerful critics, including President Bush.

Darn that theocratic Bush! This is one of the most stunning breakthroughs of stem-cell therapy, and he wants to throw it all away, just because his "religion" doesn't agree with science. Science, man! Does Bush think he's God?

Why is the Bush administration trying to stop such a wonderful medical advances from embryonic stem-cell research as a cure for diebetes?

Of course, the elipses above indicates something was cut out. Here is the next paragraph after the first above:

Diabetics using stem-cell therapy have been able to stop taking insulin injections for the first time, after their bodies started to produce the hormone naturally again.

In a breakthrough trial, 15 young patients with newly diagnosed type 1 diabetes were given drugs to suppress their immune systems followed by transfusions of stem cells drawn from their own blood.

Needless to say, the diabetic subjects were not embryos, or they couldn't have signed the consent forms.

The chutzpah of the Times aside, I don't want to minimize the medical breakthrough reported here. More and more, we're starting to realize that stem cells may be the "magic bullet" that offers us a splendid panoply of cures for a laundry list of disease and dangerous and crippling conditions -- not just alleviate their symptoms:

They enrolled Brazilian diabetics aged between 14 and 31 who had been diagnosed within the previous six weeks. After stem cells had been harvested from their blood, they then underwent a mild form of chemotherapy to eliminate the white blood cells causing damage to the pancreas. They were then given transfusions of their own stem cells to help rebuild their immune systems.

Richard Burt, a co-author of the study from Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, said that 14 of the 15 patients were insulin-free for some time following the treatment. Eleven of those were able to dispense with supplemental insulin immediately following the infusion of stem cells and have not had recourse to synthetic insulin since then, he said.

“Two other patients needed some supplemental insulin for 12 and 20 months after the procedure, but eventually both were able to wean themselves from taking daily shots,” he added. One patient went 12 months without shots, but relapsed a year after treatment after suffering a viral infection, and resumed daily insulin injections. Another volunteer was eliminated from the study because of complications. The therapy, known as autologous hematopoietic stem cell transplantation, has already shown benefits to individuals with a range of auto-immune diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn’s disease and lupus.

I am steadfast in my support not only for proven therapies using adult stem cells but also for even greater potential therapies from placental, uterine, and embryonic stem cells.

Anent the last, I understand that a great many people see deliberately killing an embryo as a form of abortion, thus infanticide. However, as we discussed here back in August (linked above), researchers have already developed a very promising technique for extracting embryonic stem cells without harming the embryo, which continues to live and reproduce normally.

But my cause is not helped by elite media idiots who try, for political purposes -- and with all good intentions, I can only assume -- to shoehorn embryonic stem-cell research into a story that is entirely about adult stem-cell research, with the clear implication that Bush's policy would prevent future advances... such as a cure for diabetes.

You cannot raft into truth through a cataract of lies. It is a lie that embryonic stem-cell research shows no promise at all; but it's just as much a lie to say that embryonic stem-cell research has a track record of proven cures. It is at the same stage now as gene therapy was in the 1980s, prior to its first successful use in 1990.

Given time and continued research, stem-cell advances will likely be more significant to future medical care than anything since the description of DNA by James D. Watson and Francis Crick in 1953. We're already seeing extraordinary cures by the use of stem cells; and there is every reason to pour resources into all forms of stem-cell research, including embryonic -- with proper safeguards to avoid killing embryos.

But please, folks on both sides of the debate... stick to the truth: The web is tangled enough as is.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, April 11, 2007, at the time of 2:22 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

January 8, 2007

Cutie's Pie

For years, I have wondered why we assume that two persons -- call them Pat and Mike -- who eat the same portion of the same food necessarily absorb the same number of calories. I mean that it's inherently implausible: the calories you absorb depend upon the precise mechanism of digestion; since everything else in our bodies works with varying degrees of efficiency, why shouldn't the stomach, small intestine, and large intestine as well?

We've all seen people who eat, eat, eat, yet cannot gain a single pound; and others who eat no more than everyone else at table, exercise as much or more -- yet pack on the leaf-lard, year after year, regardless.

I'm in the latter camp; my agent is the in former... when Ashley described to me how he ate his way across Italy some years ago -- at least 3,000 calories per day (by the traditional measurement) -- I could only seethe with envy. The answer seemed pretty obvious to me: that "3,000 calories" for Ashley was really only about 1,500 per day; but had I eaten all that pasta and pizza, cheese-stuffed portabellas and cream sauce... it would have been about 4,500 calories per diem!

But the proof (of the pudding?) has been lacking -- until now. Last month, AP reported a stunning breakthrough in our understanding of how food calories become body calories... which will eventually allow us to perfectly manage weight, from morbidly obese, to obese, to overweight, to underweight, to skeletal:

The size of your gut may be partly shaped by which microbes call it home, according to new research linking obesity to types of digestive bacteria.

Both obese mice - and people - had more of one type of bacteria and less of another kind, according to two studies published Thursday in the journal Nature.

As it happens, humans cannot naturally digest the food we eat. This isn't unusual; termites cannot naturally digest wood, either. All we can do is break the food down to itty bitty pieces: the final work of turning fats, carbohydrates, and protein to lean body tissue, blood, bone, body fat, and biochemical energy is done by bacteria that live in our digestive tract. (This is the scientific field of "infectobesity.")

There are two main types of bacteria that can do the job of actually digesting food: Bacteroidetes and Firmicutes; the latter are much more effective than the former. Firmicutes extract more body calories per food calorie than do Bacteroidetes... and the exact mix of these bacteria in Pat's and Mike's digestive system determines, to a large degree, how much weight they pack on:

In one study, Gordon and colleagues looked at what happened in mice with changes in bacteria level. When lean mice with no germs in their guts had larger ratios of Firmicutes transplanted, they got "twice as fat" and took in more calories from the same amount of food than mice with the more normal bacteria ratio, said Washington University microbiology instructor Ruth Ley, a study co-author.

It was as if one group got far more calories from the same bowl of Cheerios than the other, Gordon said.

In a study of dozen dieting people, the results also were dramatic.

Before dieting, about 3 percent of the gut bacteria in the obese participants was Bacteroidetes. But after dieting, the now normal-sized people had much higher levels of Bacteroidetes - close to 15 percent, Gordon said.

From an evolutionary standpoint, I would guess that people whose ancestors (on the mother's side) were poor and often on the brink of starvation probably have higher levels of Firmicutes in their guts; we get our necessary bacterial "infection" from our first food -- usually breast milk -- and in starvation situations, females with higher levels of Firmicutes would be much more likely to survive and breed, being able to extract more calories from the meagre amounts of available food.

Either way, this holds out the promise of finally being able to help people lose weight (or gain it) by techniques more effective than the crude "eat less and exercise more" -- which sounds great but actually works for only a fraction of the population. To lose weight, replace a portion of the patient's Fermicutes with Bacteroidetes. Similarly, by reversing that process, impoverished people in countries prone to famine could be more fully nourished by the smaller amounts of food available to them.

Millions of Americans have been waiting for just such a breakthrough... now we just have to wait until the doctors decide to do some large-scale longitudinal studies. (Pssst... I volunteer!)

That is, if the Center for Science in the Public Interest -- the folks who breathlessly informed us all that Mexican food, Chinese food, pizza, and popcorn were fattening -- will allow infectobesity research to continue... or whether they will launch a jihad against it, as they did against the synthetic fat substitute olestra.

See, the CSPI believes that suffering and hardship builds character; and by golly, they're out to make sure we get it, good and hard. What it really boils down to is this: who do you want to control your caloric intake... you and your doctor? Or a bunch of sallow, pasty-faced vegans giddy from self-induced malnutrition?

Hand me that bucket of Bacteroidetes, Mabel, and down the hatch!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 8, 2007, at the time of 7:15 AM | Comments (13) | TrackBack

January 7, 2007

Egg Whites

A little while ago (August 23rd, 2006), we posted on the discovery that human embryonic stem cells could be extracted non-destructively, leaving the embryo intact; then on November 9th, we noted how President Bush could make use of this stunning breakthrough, offering to fully fund federal stem-cell research with two conditions:

• That the funding be available not only for embryonic but also adult and placental stem-cell research;
• That funding for embryonic stem-cell research only be made available to researchers that used the new, non-destructive extraction technique.

And now there's this:

Scientists reported Sunday they had found a plentiful source of stem cells in the fluid that cushions babies in the womb and produced a variety of tissue types from these cells - sidestepping the controversy over destroying embryos for research.

Researchers at Wake Forest University and Harvard University reported the stem cells they drew from amniotic fluid donated by pregnant women hold much the same promise as embryonic stem cells. They reported they were able to extract the stem cells without harm to mother or fetus and turn their discovery into several different tissue cell types, including brain, liver and bone.

I believe it's now more crucial than ever that Bush and the GOP in Congress get out front of this issue by themselves proposing a huge increase in funding, including funding for amniotic-fluid stem-cell research, along with adult, placental, and even embryonic (when extracted non-destructively).

This would flummox the Democrats and take the wind out of their soles; it's particularly effective in countering the meme of "anti-science, fundamentalist Republicans" that the Democrats have so successfully wielded to turn Independents away from GOP nominees.

This is the issue; this is the time to move. There is no longer any moral case that can be made against stem-cell research... so while the Democrats are floundering around with minimum wage proposals (that the Republicans should also immediately adopt and support, bad as they are, just to get them off the table), we can come roaring forth with a proposal to help everybody live to be 150 years old.

Well, that's how we should sell it, at any rate. For a change, let's make the Democrats look like tired, old men, the "establishment," perpetually trapped fighting for yesterday's leftism. It shouldn't be hard... but we actually have to do it.

There's an old story that seems apropos:

Come on, folks; there is every scientific reason why we, not the technophobic New Left, should become the champions of stem-cell research and no moral argument why not: it's an issue that truly resonates with Independents, young voters, and libertarian-conservatives... and it's darned good public policy, too.

The odds on this bet are much, much better than the odds of winning a money-type lottery. So let's buy that ticket and get out ahead of the Democrats on this important issue!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 7, 2007, at the time of 8:00 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

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