On a mailing list I’m on, there’s currently a debate about stem cells, specifically adult stem cells and cord blood stem cells vs. embryonic stem cells. A couple people have made the claim that embryonic stem cells have never been used to do anything beneficial but are in fact bad things that tend to cause tumors, and that every one of the 130 treatments that currently use stem cells use stem cells from adults (like bone marrow stem cells) or stem cells from umbilical cords. They say that embryonic stem cell research is therefore bad science that should not be funded, as it is completely unnecessary, is only good for causing cancer, has never produced a positive result, etc.
I’m not interested in any kind of debate about the morality of embryonic stem cells, but I am wondering if their information is accurate, or if it is false or somehow misleading. What’s the scoop?
I don’t know the answer to this question, but even if nothing has been done with them yet, does that mean no research should be done with them? At one time nothing beneficial had been done with antibiotics and almost every other medical advance you can think of.
Yeah, that’s a point I’ve made, that even if embryonic stem cells have produced no positive results yet, that doesn’t mean they don’t have potential – according to this NIH stem cell FAQ, embryonic stem cells have only been worked on since 1998, while adult stem cells have been used for more than 40 years. But the people arguing that embryonic stem cells are bad science are saying that there have been no positive results at all AND that there are unlikely to be any in the future because embryonic stem cells are more likely to cause cancer than to do any good. So I’m hoping somebody here can give me, well, the straight dope.
That animal study link is great, Patty O’Furniture. Thanks!
FYI, somebody in my debate has now claimed that the 2001 rat study Patty O’Furniture linked to is debunked by this document, which unfortunately is a PDF file.
That’s a pretty loose interpretation of “debunked” even by Family Research Council standards.
So, after a petri-dish culture of heartlike tissue from embryonic stem cells displayed some arrhythmia, two further studies showed long term, stable benefits in actual hearts?
I guess that’s a solid debunking of the idea that we currently have the technology to use embryonic stem cells to generate a functional heart in vitro. “Sure, they got it to work great in a mice a couple of times, but they still can’t make a carpet-like culture of muscle tissue in a dish beat steadily. Best to stop exploring that avenue of research.”
Thanks, Larry. I think the guy’s claim was actually that adult stem cells are doing much better than the embryonic stem cells, but that section you quoted and your analysis made me see something I hadn’t seen. It appears that their own data indicates that things are only getting better with embryonic stem cells.