I just read about a team of European doctors who recently completed a successful windpipe transplant surgery. The important part is that the donor windpipe "[...] was stripped of its donor’s cells [...]" and coated in the recipient's stem cells. Since the surgery the patient has had to take no immunosuppressant drugs and her body has had no immune-system reaction to the transplant other than the healing of the surgical wounds.
Is it just me or has anyone else been waiting for this since Dolly was cloned? (I would like to note that at the time of Dolly's birth I still lived in Las Vegas and was ten years old.) When I first heard about Dolly I assumed we would be cloning humans and body parts inside of the decade basing this on a vague assumption along the lines of: the process of cloning a sheep has to overlap at least 99% with the process of cloning a person. Aside from eventually being told of the various ethical reasons for the ban on the cloning of humans I do not today know all that much more about the science of procedures like this. I took the obligatory high-school classes, but did not enjoy them much and didn't really learn too much.
Today I simply do not know enough about the science behind this work to comprehend why progress is so slow, and that leads me to frustration over what I perceive to be the relatively slow pace of development. I suppose that in this way my ignorance usually forces me to underestimate and subsequently ignore the value of achievements like this, so I am posting this as part of an effort to slowly educate myself a bit.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
I have some possibly relevant insight:
ReplyDeleteResearchers have to report to so many different oversight agencies, progress becomes difficult. I recently spoke to a researcher who had his specimens physically taken away from him just as he was about to confirm his hypothesis on why a strain of bacteria was virulent. He is unable to confirm his theory, and will likely have to wait 2+ years before being able to work with the strain again. It was taken away from him because somebody somewhere decided to tighten regulations. The particular researcher said that these regulations were directly hindering scientific progress.
I suppose this does not speak quite to your question, but it brings up an interesting conundrum. Safety/security versus progress: where should the line be drawn?
I don't really have a good comment, but I did enjoy the post.
ReplyDeletei 100% agree with you. at 10, i was convinced that within a year of the Dolly breakthrough we'd all be living in the world of 'Multiplicity' (which is a great, great film, don't let anybody tell you otherwise). and, like you, i've learned little about this type of technology since then so i have no idea why it's progressed so seemingly slowly. but this is really amazing and makes me hopeful about lots of diseases and conditions!
ReplyDeleteScience - 2, Bart - 0. Well done, Science. Well Done.
ReplyDeletewhaaaat
ReplyDeleteAWESOME
From the wooly mammoth article:
ReplyDelete"The same would be technically possible with Neanderthals, whose full genome is expected to be recovered shortly, but there would be several ethical issues in modifying modern human DNA to that of another human species."
I'm totally going to write a movie about this or something.