The quote below is from a CNN news article:
(CNN) — For the first time, a patient has received a synthetic windpipe that was created in a lab with the patient’s own stem cells and without using human donor tissue, researchers said Thursday.
Look carefully at the sentence. The stem cells were the patient’s own stem cells. It looks as though the technology has finally advanced to the point that there are some good prospects for some fantastic advances in science that may allow for treatments that were thought to be impossible even 10 years ago. But, that is not what has me excited. It is the patient’s own stem cells. This is highly important for two reasons, one medical and one religious.
The medical reason is that people do not tend to reject their own tissues. Well, at least most of the time. For those of you medically minded, you already know that there are some autoimmune diseases. What is an autoimmune disease? Well, the short of it is that for some reason, the human body turns against itself and starts fighting itself. In extreme circumstances, it can lead to death, killed by your own body.
The religious reason is what has me happiest. If this technology fulfills the hopes of this first transplant, this would resolve the whole stem cell argument. Everyone agrees that harvesting your own stem cells and giving them back to you in a new shape is fully ethical and moral. In passing, I think everyone agrees that harvesting a consenting adult’s stem cells for transplant to another person is also ethical. In fact, in certain limited cases, even harvesting a child’s stem cells may be considered both ethical and moral, for instance if the stem cells are being harvested from a child for transplant back to that child or to a sibling or near relative.
So, let’s keep praying and hoping for increasing advances in the field of adult (and in certain limited cases child) stem cell harvest and therapy.
Thanks for that Ernesto, many people with CIDP like I have , have received stem cells from their own bone marrow and have been helped tremendously. The main problem I think is the cost and whether insurance will cover it.
this is pretty awesome news!!
What I don’t understand is those who continue to advocate for creating and using pre-born humans (they de-humanise them by calling them ’embryos’) for harvesting stem cells when, as far as I know from my reading, all the medical advances involving stem cells have come from stem cells taken from humans already born.
I definitely do not understand producing embryos in order to harvest stem cells. I am medical enough to understand the use of cadaver parts. Most organ transplants, after all, come from cadavers. But, it is illegal to kill people in order to harvest their body parts. The same needs to be true of deliberate killing of embryos in order to harvest body parts.
I do need to correct you on only one thing. The words embryo and fetus are extremely old and pre-date any American usage. From the Wikipedia:
“Fœtus or foetus is the British, Irish and Commonwealth spelling, which has been in use since at least 1594.”
When an egg is fertilized, it goes through various stages: zygote, blastocyst, embryo, fetus. NONE of those terms were invented in order to dehumanize people. They are legitimate medical terms.
Please note that I did not say the term ’embryos’ (or any other medical term) was created/invented/coined to de-humanise the pre-born child. Rather, I said those who wish to de-humanise the pre-born child (whether to justify abortion, harvesting of stem cells, or some else) employ the term ’embryo’.
Ahh, OK that is a very helpful clarification.
Amen to that!! There is a lot of things out there I don’t understand and certainly don’t make sense. LOL
Sorry for the duplicate — I received multiple errors whilst trying to post a single reply.
Is OK, I just deleted the duplicates now.