Re: Stem cells found in adults!

From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Thu Jan 24 2002 - 17:36:10 MST


On Thu, 24 Jan 2002, John Grigg wrote:

> This is an amazing breakthrough if it turns out to be true!

John, you need to spend a little more time browsing through
PubMed to *educate* yourself. The evidence that adults probably
carry totipotent stem cells has been accumulating for several years.

For example the date on:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov:80/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=11486730&dopt=Abstract
is *March 2001* and its a *review* article meaning that people
have been accumulating evidence for quite some time.

> I would love to see a way around the controversy of using aborted baby tissues.

Embryonic stem cells are *not* produced from anything that
could be *remotely* considered a baby. I strongly suspect
by the time an embryo begins to remotely take on a human form,
most of the cells have lost all ability to be "totipotent".
In fact, I don't believe that any of the current embryonic stem cell
lines were produced from aborted tissue at all! I believe they
were manufactured in the lab directly from fertilized eggs.

I'll agree that the article is good news, since the results
seem to be quite reproducible.

But you *missed* the most interesting part of the article:

> Also, Verfaillie's group has done the tests that are perhaps
> the gold standard in assessing a cell's plasticity. She placed
> single MAPCs from humans and mice into very early mouse
> embryos, when they are just a ball of cells. Analyses of mice
> born after the experiment reveal that a single MAPC can
> contribute to all the body's tissues.

If this is written accurately, then it means that human-mouse
chimeras have been produced. Now *that* I find interesting
because I was unaware of it. But thinking about it, it would
seem to me that someone must have done this before. Does anyone
know how far you can push it (10:1, 5:1, 1:1 Mouse:Human ratio)
and what happens when you do?

Robert



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 13:37:36 MST