STEM CELL RESEARCH HAS ALREADY GONE SO FAR TO HEAL DAMAGES HEARTS, SAVE LIMBS, EVEN MAKE THE PARALYZED WALK AGAIN. BUT BECAUSE OF ETHOLOGICAL REASONS WE CAN’T DO ANY OF IT FOR ANYONE.
I just read this article on my new hero. He’s the guy that i would put on my myspace page of who i’d like to meet. His name is Robert Lanza and he’s one of those people that could have actually saved my dad’s life. He is HOPE. This interview is stomach dropping because there is stuff out there that can take so much misery and death from people that need it now. Here’s a few excerpts from this interview In Discover Magazine:
This seems like lifesaving technology on an unprecedented scale, yet the work has been stymied by politics. It must be frustrating to have these cells sitting around the lab, in storage, when you could be helping people.
Four years ago I was driving to work, going up a hill on a quiet little road with a speed limit of 15 miles an hour. I was in a rush and whirled into the parking lot, and there’s this police cruiser next to me. I almost hit it. “Oh, jeez, now I’m screwed,” I thought. I went into my office, started working, and a few minutes later a scientist from the next office over comes in and says, “Bob, there’s a police officer out there who wants to see you. He has handcuffs and a gun.” The whole lab is thinking he’s there to arrest me. He says, “Dr. Lanza, could I speak to you in your office?” so I brought him in. It turns out that I had just published a paper showing that we could create human retinal pigment epithelial cells capable of restoring visual function in animals. The officer had a 16-year-old son who would go totally blind in two years without the therapy. By the time he finished his story, I was almost in tears because we had these cells and they had been frozen at that point for nine months.
Why couldn’t you take them out of storage to help the boy?
We didn’t have $20,000, which is what we needed to do the preclinical studies required for working with people. At that point, our phones had been turned off. We didn’t have a fax machine. I couldn’t even afford bottled water for my pipettes. The point is, there is just no funding because basic research is generally funded by the government and
the government will not fund stem cell work.
What else are you storing, still unfunded, in the vault?
We have cells that reverse paralysis in sheep that have spina bifida and can’t walk. After we injected our cells, the first animal that we treated returned to normal and was walking fine. The same model could work for paralyzed humans, but without funding, we haven’t been able to repeat the experiment in five years. People are in wheelchairs when there could be a cure.
A few years ago a woman contacted me. In the course of chemotherapy for a tumor, something must have been activated, and for some unknown reason the glial cells in her cerebellum had started to degenerate. She was a lady with all these kids. Slowly she started to lose her ability to talk. She began to use a walker. She got worse and worse, and then, not long ago, she died.
You could have helped her?
Yes, we have cells that probably could have helped her with a single injection. One of her sons kept coming and asking, “Is there anything you can do?” But we didn’t have the resources to go through the process at the FDA. It’s heart wrenching to see this happening, knowing that this work is being held up.
Amid all this, are you still trying to achieve your first dream, harvesting embryonic stem cells from human clones?
We’re continuing this work, but with less urgency since the discovery of
induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells—adult cells that have been reprogrammed back to an embryonic state. We’re working on new ways to reprogram skin cells that would allow us to safely create a bank of stem cell lines that would closely match the population as a whole. It turns out that only 100 cell lines could give you a complete haplotype, or immune, match for 50 percent of the U.S. population. These reprogrammed cells are not as controversial since you don’t use cloning or embryos.
What do these technologies portend for human longevity?
It turns out that the human life span plateaus as it approaches a roof of about 120. By eliminating infectious diseases, some chronic diseases, and cancer, we can get the life span past 100. I think with tissue engineering we can patch you together like a bicycle tire, replacing a kidney with a kidney and a heart with a heart, to about 120 years. That was always my thinking: That was the limit. But with these hemangioblasts, I now have questioned my own rules. These cells can go in and fix the damaged tissue inside, almost like nanoparticles. We may be able to do the same thing with similar cell lines for neurons, where we can repair the damage in the brain itself. So if it continues the way it’s going, we may break that ceiling, like breaking the sound barrier. I’d be very hesitant to put a lid as to
where longevity is going to go.
You’re launching the future of medicine, but it is still on hold.
Rather than curing disease, we’re trying to get around theological problems. It’s not what I signed up for in medical school. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thrown my hands up and said, “Enough, I can’t take it anymore,” but then I’m back the next day. We’re crippled, but they can’t stop us forever. We’ve now got enough irons in the fire and hopefully ways to bypass many of these objections. But it’s just a shame that the research has been held up so long. We’re living through a paradigm shift. People are going to look back at us and say, “They used to cut people’s legs off.” Then they’ll just give an injection and the blood flow will be restored and the limb saved. If I were a patient and I knew I was going to have my leg cut off and something could be done, I would be demanding it. But most people, even most scientists, don’t realize what we’re capable of. I realize it because I’m doing the work and I can see what’s possible before my eyes.
You can read the interview in full at http://discovermagazine.com/2008/sep/19-fighting-for-the-right-to-clone/
Do more googling on Robert Lanza and see what’s out there for stem cell research.
And here is the first addition of USELESS INFORMATION
from your truly,
Steve Aoki
