Transterrestrial Musings

Comments

You've got the link from the previous post instead of the one to Card.
Glad you got your power supply problems fixed. I had a similar problem only it was burning out monitors instead of mobos.

Posted by Stewart at October 26, 2004 10:37 AM

It wasn't burning out mobos. It was just making me think it was. I had to replace the previous board because I broke the RAM socket while attempting to diagnose it.

Posted by Rand Simberg at October 26, 2004 10:52 AM

Quote: "I had to replace the previous board because I broke the RAM socket while attempting to diagnose it."

Been there, done that.

Posted by Josh "Hefty" Reiter at October 26, 2004 10:58 AM

From Card's piece:

2. Embryonic stem cells have been researched for some time, and there is no encouragement for the belief that they will provide a cure for Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's, or spinal cord injuries like the one Christopher Reeve suffered.

I'm going to have to disagree here. I wasn't able to attend this year's Society for Neuroscience meeting this past weekend in San Diego, but there were apparently presentations by Hans Keirstead and others about some very striking results with embryonic stem cells.

From an article in the San Diego Union-Tribune:

Hans Keirstead from UC Irvine reported that his lab was able to coax human embryonic stem cells into developing into oligodendrocytes, a type of cell in the brain that forms myelin, a fatty substance that insulates the long, wire-like extensions of nerve cells, called axons. The myelin sheaths, which are also destroyed in people suffering from multiple sclerosis, allow electrical signals to travel between nerve cells in the brain and body.

After much effort to purify oligodendrocytes in the lab, Keirstead transplanted the cells into rats seven days after their spinal cords had been surgically severed.

The transplanted oligodendrocytes survived, migrated to the proper place in the animals' damaged nervous system and restored myelin to the axons that had lost it after injury, Keirstead said.

As a result, the animals were able to support their weight, re-animate their tails and gain some walking ability.

"It's not perfect," said Keirstead. "They're not playing soccer, but they're doing extremely well."

In other work, University of Wisconsin researcher Clive N. Svendsen reported that neural stem cells taken from fetal tissue can be quickly multiplied in the lab. The cells, then engineered to produce a naturally-occurring molecule called a growth factor, glial-derived neurotrophic factor or GDNF, were transplanted directly into the brains of rats.

Once inside the brain, the stem cells producing GDNF led to increased levels of dopamine, a key neurotransmitter lost in Parkinson's.
...
Evan Snyder, a stem cell biologist at The Burnham Institute in La Jolla, said he is studying how stem cells transplanted into the brain appear to attack tumors there.

In mice studies, Snyder has found that neural stem cells grown in the lab and transplanted into mice migrated from one side of the brain to the other, homing in on, surrounding and infiltrating tumors. They even attack the blood vessels that feed them, he said.

Posted by Neil Halelamien at October 26, 2004 01:09 PM

I dunno a rats nervous system is far less sophisticated then our own. A good friend of mine from highschool who's now a neurosurgeon, though I've since lost touch with him when he went off to medical school, told me about this time he was performing 'surgery' on a rat in a Baylor college class. They used ether to put the rats under and performed a neck surgery to remove some gland or other thingamajig. Anyways they had this rat sliced open and the neck was splayed wide apart. Then, all of a sudden, the rat wakes up, jumps up on its feet, and starts to make a drunken zig zag dash for the edge of the table. Somehow I don't think a person in the middle of surgery could muster the chutzpah to leap up and jump off the operating table while their neck is sliced open. We have already created imbedded chips that allow cock roaches and rats to be directionaly controlled with a joy stick. Yet that same technology is no where near being able to have any affect on people. Maybe possibly you could hit an key and make someone urinate down their pants leg on command but I dunno about full directional control. Point is that the level of sophistatication between rat and human nervous systems are worlds apart.

Posted by Josh "Hefty" Reiter at October 26, 2004 01:57 PM

The truth is that Bush is the first president to allow embryonic stem cell research. And the only restriction on it is that it be confined to existing lines of embryonic stem cells.

What? Embryonic stem cells were isolated in 1998. By 2000, NIH had released final guidelines with the backing of Clinton. Things changed under Bush. And the very limited "existing lines" mentioned are essentially useless.

No scientist, speaking as a scientist, could possibly predict the results of experiments that have not yet been performed. Cures come where and when they happen to come, as often from unexpected places as from expected ones.

Well, duh. There are, however, many scientists that say this is extremely important research.

So at least as far as we know right now, no matter how much money you throw at embryonic stem cell research, ain't nobody gettin' out of his wheelchair and walkin'.

I'm confused. I thought he just said you couldn't predict results? But here he is predicting failure?

John Kerry says he's against "disenfranchising" people.

He really means, "except for people who believe their view of morality comes from God." Those people can just sit down and shut up, while the unbelievers make all the laws that rule their lives.

Don't know about Kerry, but what annoys me is when people come up with excuses against an issue, like this one, without admitting the REAL reason they are against it is because of their religion. If you are against research with flyspecks of tissue because your religion says that is a human being, ADMIT IT. Don't dance around the issue. Of course, I might wonder why you are focusing on this particular subject, when there are so many ways blastocysts are lost.

Posted by VR at October 26, 2004 02:09 PM

I dunno a rats nervous system is far less sophisticated then our own.

In terms of behavior humans and rats are certainly different, but when it comes to the genes and processes of development and healing, the two species are very similar. In the spine-healing study, it should be noted that it was human embryonic stem cells (not rat embryonic stem cells) which were healing the rats.

Yet that same technology is no where near being able to have any affect on people.

I think this is much more a matter of ethics than technology. That said, there were recently some very interesting results from a company (Cyberkinetics) with using an implanted chip to allow a quadriplegic to use his thoughts to play Pong and check his email: http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/health/2004-10-10-braingate-cover_x.htm

Posted by Neil Halelamien at October 26, 2004 02:12 PM

VR,

I think the comment was _supposed_ to be 'first President to provide _funding_ for embryonic stem cell research.' Not just 'allow'. Shrug.

(Clearly, just a timing issue though, so I fail to care.)

Posted by Al at October 26, 2004 04:03 PM

> From an article in the San Diego Union-Tribune:
> Hans Keirstead from UC Irvine reported that his lab was able to

There's a big difference between results that are reported to the San Diego Union-Tribune and results that are published in a peer-reviewed journal and replicated by independent researchers.

Posted by Edward Wright at October 26, 2004 06:13 PM

Actually, as a scientist I have to say that the whole issue of basic research funding is one giant red herring. This is one area where both sides are quite close. There is no difference I know of in how the Bush Administration and a putative Kerry Administration would generally fund NSF and NIH.

That the Bush Administration chooses to be cheap with embryonic stem-cell funding in particular is of very minor importance. Think it through: it is either true or not true that embryonic stem cells are a very promising possibility for break-through cures in a range of afflictions from paralysis to Alzheimer's.

If it's not true, then the Kerry position on this is -- what a surprise -- simply a cynical brain-dead pander to the uniformed and desperate.

On the other hand, if it's true, does anyone really think that this fact would be obvious to millions of Joe Sixpack voters but not obvious to hundreds of smart biotech investors, pension fund managers and venture capitalists with hundreds of millions to invest? Who obviously stand to make a big pile of money if they invest early in the medical technology that can make folks like Chris Reeve walk again?

No, of course not. These people are avid. Trust me, if the best bioscience opinion is that embryonic stem cells are going to be the wave of the medical future, then folks with capital to invest are going to be fighting to dump it into smart researcher's pockets, so they can buy a piece of the action. Hell, who wouldn't buy $100,000 of stock in a start-up that has a good chance of producing a cure of Alzheimer's in the next five years, if you had the dough and were lucky enough to be able to get in on the ground floor? You'd be a complete fool not to!

The reason we even have NSF and NIH funding is to look into stuff that doesn't look promising, on which the best scientific consensus of the day is negative, at which venture capitalist laugh, and that the average voter (or William Proxmire) thinks is some kind of stupid pie-in-the-sky waste of money.

To repeat for the hard of hearing or (like the Kerry campaign) hard of thinking: we don't need government funding for obviously good ideas, because wealthy people (or big fund managers) who would love to earn a 15% annual rate of return on their capital are eagerly searching for such ideas all the time.

On the other hand, if the Johns dump a cool extra $80 mil into embryonic stem cells, but deal with al Qaeda simply by issuing subpoenas and hosting international summits, and then a nuke goes off in Washington D.C., what chance for miracle cures then? First things first, eh? The blessings of scientific (or any) progress require national security, first and foremost. Unless you're convinced national security is unimportant (in which case you don't have enough intelligence to be trusted with a vote) or you are completely convinced the Johns are just as good at that stuff as the Vulcans (I'm tempted to say ditto), then debating stem cell funding is completely bass-ackwards misplaced priority thinking.

Posted by Carl Pham at October 26, 2004 06:23 PM

> > From an article in the San Diego Union-Tribune:
> > Hans Keirstead from UC Irvine reported that his > lab was able to

> There's a big difference between results that are > reported to the San Diego Union-Tribune and
> results that are published in a peer-reviewed
> journal and replicated by independent researchers.

Dang, my links didn't work. The info in the news article was taken almost verbatim from a news release put out by the Society for Neuroscience, which (while not quite a peer-reviewed paper) can be considered reputable: http://apu.sfn.org/content/AboutSFN1/NewsReleases/am2004_human.html

Posted by Neil Halelamien at October 26, 2004 10:00 PM

> a news release... while not quite a peer-reviewed paper... can be considered reputable:

By the news media, perhaps.

"Science by press release" is not science.

Posted by Edward Wright at October 26, 2004 10:13 PM

Al, I quoted the text verbatum. In fact, "allow" was emphasized in the original text. And that's just wrong. The process was moving forward for government grants, then Bush put a lid on it, finally choosing the "existing cell line" option, which allowed him to say he wasn't really stopping it, while effectively doing so.

Carl, government spends money on basic research for a reason - business doesn't usually get interested until things are pretty far along towards applied science. Why don't we just lift the limit and let stem cell research compete for Federal research money along with other requests. If they don't get it, fine. But let's lift the unscientific restriction.

Posted by VR at October 26, 2004 11:28 PM

> a news release... while not quite a peer-reviewed paper... can be considered reputable:

By the news media, perhaps.

"Science by press release" is not science.

Picky, picky. ;)

After searching around SFN's site, I managed to find the (peer-reviewed) research abstract for Keirstead's work. I suspect they probably also published a full paper in the conference proceedings, but since the conference is still ongoing, the proceedings obviously aren't out yet. Here's the abstract:

HUMAN EMBRYONIC STEM CELL DERIVATIVES REMYELINATE AND RESTORE LOCOMOTION AFTER SPINAL INJURY
H.S.Keirstead*; G.Bernal; G.Nistor; M.Totoiu; F.Cloutier; K.Sharp; O.Steward
Dept Anat & Neurobiol, Univ. of California, Irvine, CA, USA
Demyelination contributes to loss of function following spinal cord injury, and so a potential therapeutic strategy involves replacing myelin forming cells. Here, we show that transplantation of human embryonic stem cell (hESC) -derived oligodendrocyte progenitors (OPCs) into adult rat spinal cord injuries enhances remyelination and promotes recovery of motor function. OPCs were injected seven days or ten months after injury. Transplanted cells survived, migrated short distances, and differentiated into oligodendrocytes. Animals that received OPCs seven days after injury exhibited enhanced remyelination and improved locomotor ability. In contrast, when OPCs were transplanted ten months after injury, there was no enhanced remyelination or locomotor recovery. A possible explanation is that demyelinated axons that remained at 10 months after injury were surrounded by astrocyte processes, which might prevent remyelination. These studies document the feasibility of pre-differentiating hESCs into OPCs and demonstrate their therapeutic potential at early time points after spinal cord injury.

This project was supported by Geron Corporation, the UC Discovery Grant, the Roman Reed Spinal Cord Injury Research Fund of California, Research for Cure, and individual donations to the Reeve-Irvine Research Center.

Posted by Neil Halelamien at October 27, 2004 12:09 AM

Your first statement is either obvious or wrong, depending on what you mean by "pretty far along."
For the sake of brevity, I'll assume the former.

Your second statement misses the point. Of course the restriction is unscientific -- it's moral.

And so? Morality is no stranger to scientific research. Some people feel, for example, that it's wrong to try out new and dangerous medical therapies on people -- say condemned criminals, the retarded, or illegal immigrants -- without their consent, no matter how beneficial the knowledge gained might be. Some people believe that if you do a double blind clinical trial of a therapy for advanced lung cancer and you discover halfway through that the therapy is hugely better than the placebo, you're morally obliged to stop the trial (throwing away any possibility of getting more and better data), so that you can give the real therapy to those who have been getting the placebo.

Some other people believe it's wrong to deliberately infect apes with AIDS to try out new vaccines (which nearly always don't work, unfortunately for the apes), or wrong to deliberately severe the spinal cords of cute furry animals to try out speculative thought on how to help these kinds of injuries in humans. Or to spray new shampoo formulations in the eyes of rabbits to make sure they're OK for children to use.

And, yeah, still other people believe it's wrong to create living things that incontrovertably would, if left to themselves, grow into human beings, and then destroy them in the process of research.

Now, it so happens I don't agree with them, and I do not support restrictions on the use of Federal stem-cell research money. In other words, in terms of actions I agree with you.

But not in terms of attitude. I respect those who support the restrictions, and so should you. Calling the merely "unscientific" is ignorant. They come to their painful conclusion not because they're dumfuk Luddites who hate any progress since the invention of fire, but because they hold deep moral convictions, convictions that place an absolute value on each man's life which is not negotiable for the greater good or greater convenience of howsoever many other men.

I am glad such people exist, although I disagree with them in this case.

Posted by Carl Pham at October 27, 2004 02:32 AM

Neil, why are you trying so hard? I think the burden of proof is on Edward to show that his comments are relevant here.

Why should we have to refer to the rigorous criteria for science every time we hear some juicy rumor on a possible scientific breakthrough in the news? Propagating information is part of science after all, but we know it's not the whole thing. And the scientific process is unwieldy on a blog. After all, none of us are going to independently verify this story by running our own nerve regeneration tests on rats, are we?

I guess I'm just grumpy because the this-isn't-science obligatory remark is so cliched and misaimed. We're pretty well educated here so we have a good idea what the scientific process is like. Do we need to be reminded repeatly that optimistic statements by a researcher amplified by a most likely clueness newspaper reporter doesn't constitute the final, unalterable word in scientific progress?

I doubt it.

Posted by Karl Hallowell at October 27, 2004 04:17 AM

> Neil, why are you trying so hard? I think the burden of proof is on Edward

No, in science the burden of proof is on the researcher making the claim. Always.

> Why should we have to refer to the rigorous criteria for science every time
> we hear some juicy rumor on a possible scientific breakthrough in the news?

Because if we didn't, we would still be sitting around a campfire, chanting and shaking rattles. While John Edwards spread "juicy rumors" about the people Kerry had raised from the dead.

Posted by Edward Wright at October 27, 2004 10:53 AM

Carl, as I said, if someone opposes this for religious reasons, fine. I just want them to own up to it. I say "unscientific" because most of the arguments start with assertions that it isn't useful or isn't needed because of possible alternatives: Typically they start from their bias and work backwards. If someone believes that a speck of cells without a brain or organs is a human being, fine. But excuses are annoying amd unscientific.

Posted by VR at October 27, 2004 01:27 PM

VR, I 'spect we're converging somewhat. I largely agree, except. . .

I think you should say "nonscientific" not "unscientific." The former is neutral, saying merely that the discussion is not in the domain of science. The latter is, unfortunately, pejorative, and implies the argument is ill-informed or illogical, for which you have no evidence other than your own faith that (for example) defines a human being differently.

That people begin with their preferred conclusions and search for arguments to buttress them is hardly front-page news. And hardly a behaviour restricted to those who oppose embryonic stem-cell research.

And, finally, you should probably be willing to take your own medicine, and admit up front that there is, in fact, no clearly convincing scientific evidence for a belief that embryonic stem-cell research is going to pay off. You (and I) just have a (dare I say religious) faith that it will. Others, as it happens, have a different faith. Neither group should be calling the other a bunch of unrational troglodytes.

Posted by Carl Pham at October 27, 2004 03:31 PM

I found another piece in Nature, on Snyder's work: http://www.nature.com/news/2004/041025/full/041025-6.html

Biologist Evan Snyder modified stem cells taken from a human embryo, adding a gene that made the cells express a tried and trusted antitumour molecule known as TRAIL. When injected into mice with brain tumours, the cells homed in on the cancer and pumped out enough TRAIL to cut the tumour size by an average of 50%, and up to 70% in some cases.

The cells are thought to track the tumour by following chemical signals emitted by the immune system molecules that attack, but ultimately fail to destroy, the cancer. Snyder, who is based at the Burnham Institute in La Jolla, California, says similar behaviour has been observed in other animal models of brain injury, where naturally occurring stem cells will travel towards and attempt to repair damaged areas.

Posted by Neil Halelamien at October 27, 2004 04:03 PM

> > Neil, why are you trying so hard? I think the burden of proof is on Edward

> No, in science the burden of proof is on the researcher making the claim. Always.

I agree.

> > Why should we have to refer to the rigorous criteria for science every time
> > we hear some juicy rumor on a possible scientific breakthrough in the news?

> Because if we didn't, we would still be sitting around a campfire, chanting and shaking rattles. While John Edwards spread "juicy rumors" about
the people Kerry had raised from the dead.

Yeah, I don't particularly like how Kerry & Edwards are going about conveying their position on stem cell research. In the speeches I've seen thus far, they act like it's some sort of magic pixie dust, without going into any specifics. I really wish they'd mention some of the concrete results (like those I've posted here), so people actually have an idea of the current state of stem cell research, and what sorts of things it might be able to accomplish.

Of course, it's quite possible that'd go way over the average voter's head.

Posted by Neil Halelamien at October 27, 2004 06:54 PM

Is it possible to believe that life begins at conception with out it being a "religious" belief?

Posted by Barb at December 17, 2004 02:07 PM

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