Adult Stem Cells are Treating Thousands of Patients Now

[tzor]

In order for an embryo to become a person, it needs to be implanted, gestate, and be born. If it's sitting in a test tube, it will never be a person. It will never think, have a beating heart, feel, throw a ball, become an astronaut, or learn how to dive. It will be a mass of cells. Period.

You do know why the freeze embryos right? Because they just don't remain a bunch of cells. They grow and evolve and without the right envoironment they will die. You might be thinking of the checmical handshake during the process of implantation in the uterus and confusing the groth spurt after implantation with some magical change brought on my the mother (it's called food and oxygen) but that's an environment condition, not a change in the basic makeup of the organism.

[tzor]

These are different things. Certain adult stem cells are pluripotent, and can be induced via synthetic techniques to engage in cell specialization.

Embryonic stem cells are pluripotent, and they don't have to be induced to engage in cell specialization, they do it on their god damn own.

Can you understand why the latter is important? If you want to understand the process of how stem cells turn into organs, looking at adult stem cells is completely fucking useless unless you know how to synthetically induce them to transform. Embryonic stem cells, however, will do it completely on their own as a part of their natural life cycle, and you can study that.

Embryonic stems cells develop IN THE EMBRYO (location, location, location). Outside of the embryo, they remain stem cells. If you want to study that you need to study the embryo itself, not the cells taken in isolation that unless atrifically triggered continue to produce MORE STEM CELLS. (Like, that's how you get that stem cell line in the first place!)

So the research using frozen embryos is not to determine how they evolve naturally. It is the exact same thing as the research with adult stem cells, how to get them to evolve artifically. The only difference is that you have a whole plethora of the exact same cell to try and try and try again. It's easier on the researcher.

[DSMatticus]

Do you think that embryo grows in discrete, magical leaps? 1 cell, 100 cells, 10000 cells?

No - at any given moment in any given embryo, some of its cells are literally currently either multiplying into new and more stem cells, or specializing into tissue. You don't have to do anything - it is a process that is happening before your eyes. Embryos don't stop growing, and at any given point during the lifespan of any given embryo, you can totally look and find active development somewhere, if not everywhere. Taking a sample from that embryo is exactly like taking a single snapshot of its state at that current moment - and that state is going to include cells doing the processes we're interested in.

And getting them to multiply into new stem cells is literally a matter of sitting back and culturing them (slightly more complex than that, I suppose). They very nearly grow on their own, the only thing they don't do spontaneously in an artificial environment is specialize. This is very much not the case with adult stem cells, which have limited diversity, are hard to obtain in sufficient quantities, and usually require a significant amount of tampering before they'll do anything at all.

Embryonic stem cells are primed to grow and expand, because that's the phase of development they came from. Adult stem cells are inert, because development is over.

[Username17]

You do know why the freeze embryos right? Because they just don't remain a bunch of cells.

Wow. That's retarded.

Look, I'm being as respectful as I possibly can on this, but you don't know what you're talking about. That is the beginning and end of any serious debate on this or any related subject. You're not a biologist and don't seem to have even a passing familiarity with relevant biological concepts.

An embryo of the type that we're talking about could turn into a human being, but it could also turn into two or three or twenty eight human beings, because the cell cleaves into multiple cells that are themselves capable of growing and dividing (and apoptosing) into a complete human given the proper environment. And the proper environment might or might not be a human's womb or even a cow's womb, but for now at least it won't be any test tube we are presently capable of making.

But seriously: everything you say, and I mean every single part of it, is nonsense. People who actually have some familiarity with embryology and gynecological medicine (like for example: me) look at your writings on this and all related subjects and go "What the fuck is this shit?" Because there is no part of the things you say that give even the slightest hint that you have the tiniest glimmer of understanding of how this process actually works.

Cell differentiation and specialization is not magic. It's complicated. And we don't understand how all of it works, and by extension we can't reproduce all of it ourselves in a lab. But it's still an entirely chemical and replicable and explicable process. And you don't win any converts when you grab some weird quote-mined tirade off of "Life News" and parade it around as if it turns medical science on its head. You really don't.

All your showing is the "garbage in, garbage out" principle. You read the scrawlings of anti-abortion-rights nutjobs who have no knowledge or appreciation of science, and then you regurgitate that information as if their bronze-age speculation was somehow deeply relevant medical insight. It's not. And as we learn more and more about the way the human body works and how it develops, we rely on the crap you peddle as "Ancient Wisdom" less and less. And you do yourself no favors by re-packaging your archaic aphorisms in sciencish words. Because everyone who knows anything about the subject can easily see that you know nothing. And the people feeding you talking points know nothing. And the people giving marching orders to the people feeding you talking points know nothing. And so on up the chain of tradition as far as you want to go.

It is exactly this that led me to put in a rule for After Sundown where certain kinds of argument actually required you to have a relevant background skill to use without having it explode if your audience did have a relevant background skill. As soon as you start talking about how medicine actually works when in reality you don't have a fucking clue, the fact that you are wholly unarmed in the battle of wits is grotesquely and immediately apparent to every single person involved in this discussion.

So here's the final word: if you want to talk about stem cells at all, then you need to start having an appreciation of transcription factors and get at least a little bit of a grasp about why we care about them and why we need to know more. I notice that you didn't respond to the Sonic Hedgehog protein portion of the discussion at all. Instead you just said that I was lying and moved on. Well: fuck you. I wasn't lying. It's really important. Before anyone will take anything you say on embryology seriously, you have to have a grasp on what Stumpy the Duck means for human growth and development. Here's Stumpy the Duck:



OK. Do you understand why Stumpy is important? Do you know why he looks like that? Do you know what his existence means for human growth and development? Do you know what he means for human disease? Bonus question: this is Lakshmi the Human being:



Are Lakshmi and Stumpy related? If so, how and why? If not, how and why? If you can't answer these questions, can you kindly shut the fuck up while the adults talk?

-Username17

[RadiantPhoenix]

Are they related, in a conceptual sense, because they both have extra limbs, or is there more to it than that?

[Neeeek]

Are they related, in a conceptual sense, because they both have extra limbs, or is there more to it than that?

I'm not sure what's up with Stumpy the Duck there, but the little kid is one half of a pair of conjoined twins, with the other twin being stillborn.

[tzor]

It's one of the reasons I'm just sick and tried of talking to Frank anymore, he knows he's writing crap for crap sake, and he think he can get away with it because ... well because he thinks I'm stupid.

Merged zygotes that result in chimeras or partial cojoined organisms has absolutely nothing to do with embryonic stem cell research. He fucking knows this but the commie elite in him has to constantly show off how big his fucking mental dick is.

[RadiantPhoenix]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymelia

They are different; apparently Stumpy is actually a single duck that has grown additional limbs. This means that stem cells can produce additional limbs; we don't know how to do it yet, but embryos can apparently do it naturally; if we watch them do it, we might be able to learn how it is done so we can cause it to happen in someone who is missing a limb.

I had never heard of this before.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

It's one of the reasons I'm just sick and tried of talking to Frank anymore,

Then leave. You are posting things that you know are wrong then say stupider things so people will berate you. You remind me of a catholic I am in acquaintance with that cuts herself as self-flagellation for drinking herself into a stupor every night. Please stop using us as a tool to punish yourself, it's sad and creepy.

[Shiritai]

Are they related, in a conceptual sense, because they both have extra limbs, or is there more to it than that?

I'm not sure what's up with Stumpy the Duck there, but the little kid is one half of a pair of conjoined twins, with the other twin being stillborn.

Yeah, that looks like the case for Lakshmi, and Stumpy looks like a classic example of a hox mutation, so while both of them have symmetrical duplications, one would be from an environmental cause while the other's genetic.

[K]

Tzor,

Frank is not just being mean to you. He's trying to point out that your very limited understanding of this topic is insufficient for anything you think about it to be taken seriously. This is why no one is taking you seriously.

It's like getting legal advice from someone who watched an episode of Matlock.

This is not the kind of issue you can read a few articles on and then be expected to be taken seriously, especially when the articles you are reading are incorrect propaganda.

I've actually been reading this thread for a while, but I haven't felt the need to say anything because literally nothing you have said has demonstrated even a basic understanding of scientific research methods or this particular area of research.

[tzor]

This is one of the things I love about the scientific elite trolls (who really are just like other trolls ... you guys have no reason to complain about the 4riies trolls because they are just you in a different subject). They will blather on in deeper and more complex side issues, change the goal posts, and basically do anything they think they can to discredit the main point.

So let's get back to the original argument. Adult Stem Cells are making cures here and now; yet I constantly hear "If we don't allow new stem cell lines by killing embryos we won't get no cures ever!" Adult Stem Cell research is making cures now without the need to kill anyone.

First major troll argument: Yea, but without embryonic stem cell research those adult stem cell research would have been imposible. Debateable, but moot. The research is now independent from embryonic and doesn't need to create any new embryonic stem cell lines in order to continue.

Second major troll argument: But they are all frozen anyway. The entire frozen embryo line might ... note the word might yeild only a hundred possible lines and the odds anyone might be interested in them are even less. But it's sure one hell of a good strawman.

Third major troll argument (thanks to Dr Frank(enstien)): THE FOUR LEGGED DUCK! (Actually was that just an argument or an ego wank ... hard to tell.) If Frank can show me one example of how embryonic stemm cell research is being used to solve the four legged duck problem (I'm not saying that it is not, research money is being wasted on far more idtiotic grants) then fine. Otherwise, stop wanking off on this thread Frank.

It's often ironic that people resort to calling the other side "propaganda" when they just can't provide counter arguments in the form of documented links themselves.

One point in a link I provided (which I really didn't bang over people's heads like a hammer ... I expect them to read for themselves) was the Korean doctor who was a major contributer to the cloning project who stoped using embryonic stem cells because it was easier to create his own pluripotent cells from regular stem cells. But hey, just dismiss anything that is not in your narrow mided worldview that was spoonfed to you by your communist professors.

Show me the embryonic stemm cell cures. That's all I ask.

[Kaelik]

"If we don't allow new stem cell lines by killing embryos we won't get no cures ever!" Adult Stem Cell research is making cures now without the need to kill anyone.

Embryos are not anyone, they are things.

First major troll argument: Yea, but without embryonic stem cell research those adult stem cell research would have been imposible. Debateable, but moot. The research is now independent from embryonic and doesn't need to create any new embryonic stem cell lines in order to continue.

1) adult stem cell cures would not exist without embryonic research.

2) The research into new adult stem cell cures is not independent from embryonic. Because the research into embryonic stem cells is for the explicit purpose of finding new things to do with adult stem cells that we couldn't do without that research.

Second major troll argument: But they are all frozen anyway. The entire frozen embryo line might ... note the word might yeild only a hundred possible lines and the odds anyone might be interested in them are even less. But it's sure one hell of a good strawman.

What you say makes no sense.

You are arguing that we should not allow embryos that are not currently used for research to be used for research, because they are not currently used.

Look at your statistics: 2.8 are already designated for research. 2.2 for discarding, 4.5 percent for "other reasons" which all basically equate to sitting there for no reason, then being trashed, and 88.2 percent that are being "held for family building" which for probably 90% of that means sitting somewhere never going to be used, because the mother has successful implantations and then never has kids again, and the other embryos all sit there, then are thrown away.

The argument being made is that all those ones that are going to be discarded, either currently designated for it, or inevitably going to be trashed, can instead be used for research, with absolutely no people who even might have existed ever not existing.

[echoVanguard]

But hey, just dismiss anything that is not in your narrow mided worldview that was spoonfed to you by your communist professors.

I don't know about the rest of you guys, but I was sure totally convinced of the infallibility of tzor's argument by this statement.

The above comment is insincere.

echo

[Username17]

Third major troll argument (thanks to Dr Frank(enstien)): THE FOUR LEGGED DUCK! (Actually was that just an argument or an ego wank ... hard to tell.) If Frank can show me one example of how embryonic stemm cell research is being used to solve the four legged duck problem (I'm not saying that it is not, research money is being wasted on far more idtiotic grants) then fine.

Wow.

OK, I really don't know how you think stem cell treatment works, but here's how it actually works:

• First, we identify how a cell is signaled externally and internally to differentiate into a specific tissue or structure.
• Then, we replicate that signal cascade on a living cell and get that tissue or structure.
• Then we implant that tissue or structure into a living host and restore function. Hooray!

Here's the part you're not getting: the first part is actually a whole fuck tonne of parts. We don't just sit in our dens thinking about this shit. We have to go find these cell signalling systems. And in order to do that we need to mess with every part of the signalling system and run these systems through their paces over and over again until we find out what each tweak does or doesn't do.

But sometimes we get a shortcut. We find an actual organism that has a mutation in it that causes a different development pathway. That lets us skip a whole bunch of trial and error steps because we already have a viable output sitting right there. That's Stumpy the Duck. He shows us one of the literally billions of changes that could occur in the developmental cell signalling cascade that provides a stable output. And it's one that develops extra limbs. And that brings us a tiny bit closer to understanding how to make extra limbs on demand. Which will be fucking great news for all the folks out there who are missing limbs.

And that right there is why you don't have an argument. If you can't understand why we're excited to find a four legged duck, you have no basis to be telling us what we should and should not do to research medical cures. Because you obviously don't have clue one as to what we do to research cures, where cures come from, or how we know they work.

But Lakshmi isn't just there to illustrate your fundamental lack of understanding in how you can't tell the difference between a major breakthrough in embryological science that promises real cures to real conditions in the near future and a technically difficult surgery case. It did do that extremely well, mind you, but that wasn't why she was there. She's in this discussion to demonstrate a fundamental failure of your entire philosophical system. See: she's two embryos. And we cut the second embryo out and threw it away, and that was a good thing.

If you are going to run around ascribing personhood to fucking embryos, then cutting the harmful extra body parts out of Lakshmi so she could walk was murder. Hell, identical twins are only one "person" in that model, and I can't even begin to wrap my mind around how the fuck you think that works. And the bottom line is that this isn't a thorny philosophical issue, this is your worldview being incompatible with the way the world really works.

It's not difficult ethical territory to split fused embryos and it's not difficult ethical territory to acknowledge the Olson Twins as being two distinct people. Real people are real people. They get names and rights. And embryos are just embryos. They are not people. The ethical "questions" of Lakshmi and Mary Kate & Ashley are so simple that it takes a fundamental lack of biological understanding to even force yourself into a position where they can be asked.

-Username17

[RobbyPants]

So let's get back to the original argument. Adult Stem Cells are making cures here and now; yet I constantly hear "If we don't allow new stem cell lines by killing embryos we won't get no cures ever!" Adult Stem Cell research is making cures now without the need to kill anyone.

I have not seen one person make that claim in this thread.

[Maj]

It's one of the reasons I'm just sick and tried of talking to Frank anymore, he knows he's writing crap for crap sake, and he think he can get away with it because ... well because he thinks I'm stupid.

This is one of the reasons I'm sick and tired of listening to you rant about subjects like this. I'm just a housewife and a mom and I can tell that your knowledge of biology is sketchy at best.

I have not seen one person make that claim in this thread.

Like I mentioned before, Tzor is making up a BBEG so he has an excuse to fight. He believes he's a paladin, therefore, evil must exist to justify his existence.

[Maxus]

I actually prefer the terms "Pro-Death" and "Pro-tyranny" to decribe the two sides of the abortion debate. Everyone likes life, and everyone likes choice.

Something an old social studies teacher said...

"If you are anti-anything, you are essentially advocating the removal of a choice from other people."

It breaks down like this:

So, if you're, say, anti-gun? You not only do not own guns, you wish for other people to not own guns and basically advocate making this be so. If you're anti-hunting, you do not hunt and you wish for others to legally forbidden from going out in the woods to shoot animals. If you're anti-abortion, you personally would not get an abortion, and you also wish that abortions were not even an option, for anyone.

[RobbyPants]

I have not seen one person make that claim in this thread.

Like I mentioned before, Tzor is making up a BBEG so he has an excuse to fight. He believes he's a paladin, therefore, evil must exist to justify his existence.

Paladins fight strawmen? Must be an evil strawman.

[DSMatticus]

Tzor, none of your supposed arguments are at all the actual argument.

The actual argument, which you aren't getting, is that adult stem cells are inactive. They can be pluripotent, and that literally doesn't matter because the environment is not in place to encourage them to develop. If you want to research how stem cells fucking turn into organs, looking at adult stem cells is fucking useless, because that's not god damn happening in adult stem cells. They're sitting there.

Frank called it "cell signalling systems," and that's exactly the issue. Embryos are communicating with a shit ton of chemicals that tell eachother, "you should probably start turning into an eye, and we need a leg over here, and hey - which one of you is doing the kidney?" and blah blah blah. And that shit isn't happening in adult stem cells, because your body isn't trying to turn adult stem cells into eyes or legs or kidneys, because it's done growing eyes or legs or kidneys. So if you want to figure out what group of chemicals encourage a stem cell to turn into a kidney, you need to isolate the embryonic stem cells that turn into a kidney, and find out what combination of chemicals caused them to turn into a kidney. If you tried to do that with an adult stem cell, you would be a stupid asshole, because that adult stem cell is not about to turn into a kidney.

You might as well suggest, "the mute can teach us how to speak languages." If you want to learn the 'language' of organ development, you have to look at cells which are speaking that language, and adult stem cells have stopped speaking that language. You can talk to them, if you know the right words, but they aren't going to listen in and learn their language because they aren't speaking anymore, so they can't help you figure out what those right words are.

[Koumei]

Wait, so if killing an embryo is murder, and we define a human as an embryo, then

A. If you only kill one identical twin and not the other, what does it constitute?

B. Are the majority of women committing manslaughter on a monthly basis?

And Tzor, my insulting of you aside - I can call you names any old time, and vice versa - do you really think that if everyone on the board disagrees with you, and some have more relevant experience in the field than you, that everyone else is wrong and you're the only one who knows what's going on?

If the majority of sources and authorities and experts out there disagree with you, and have direct relevant experience in the field and knowledge of latest findings, and of those that disagree, many are known to be liars or mistaken (based on other, unrelated things they talk about), or are using old knowledge or old "common sense wisdom" that people just repeated to each other rather than researching, that it is the majority and most up-to-date who are wrong, and the few remaining - including those who basically just sat down one day and said "It works like this, and I won't hear anything else on the matter." (thus automatically being worse-educated on the matter than anyone at all) are right?

Really. I want to know your thought process here. As someone who doesn't have any knowledge or experience in the field, all I can do is decide:
A. The majority are probably right, especially when they're the ones actually improving their knowledge and looking for new answers.
B. If a source says Homeopathy works, and you can show how it is utter arse of the highest order, and nobody finds any evidence of it working (including me), then I have less reason to believe them when they say phrenology, astrology or exorcism is useful.
C. If they just put their foot down and say something, seemingly with the goal of holding onto power and causing suffering in others/oppressing certain groups, and never actually change this position, just inventing new things to support this base assertion even thousands of years later, then it is safe to consider everything they say to be complete balls.

So please explain how it is that you think you and your sources are more valid than the rest.

Or failing that - and here I be cheeky for just a moment and return to insulting you - consider one of the many (it's not ten, as a learned religious disciple like you surely knows. You probably know the full number, I do not, being a heretic) commandments handed to Moses, which must surely be followed:

Thou shalt never vex a stranger

Remember those of us who do not know you in person are strangers and you're the one who believes it (and is thus beholden to the laws put forth by God).

[Count Arioch the 28th]

I bet Tzor is jerking off to this thread. RIGHT NOW.

[Kaelik]

I bet Tzor is jerking off to this thread. RIGHT NOW.

This is clearly a lie. He would never spill his semen on the ground, God has forbidden it.

Sex is only for the unitive procreative act, and that is why he is having sex with a women who is ovulating, who he has been monogamously committed to for life in ceremony presided over by God.*

* While reading this thread and screaming "LOOK AT ME NOW TROLLMAN!"

[Lago PARANOIA]

But hey, just dismiss anything that is not in your narrow mided worldview that was spoonfed to you by your communist professors.

That's going in the quote rotation.

[...You Lost Me]

I love reading threads like these... nowhere else on the internet will I find smart people willing to spend pages upon pages yelling at one guy for any reason.