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Bioethics

This category contains 498 posts

“How do you say "Duh!” in French?

Il n’est pas facile! Nanodot reports on a citizen conference consensus paper which concludes that understanding nanotechnology and evaluating the ethics of research on constructs and machines built on the molecular leve requires effort and may be too hard. They didn’t know that nanotechnology existed until someone told them and then found that they had … Continue reading

>Texas, Adult Stem Cells, Multiple Sclerosis

>Opexa is a division of Pharmafronteirs (or it’s the other way around, I’m not sure) which is based at the Woodlands, near Houston, Texas. The company specializes in cell therapies, based on adult stem cells and the controlled manipulation and replication of adult cells. Multiple sclerosis (MS)is a disease that causes the loss of the … Continue reading

>Immune Privileged Cord Blood Stem Cells

>Pluristem is one of the companies focusing on the commercial development of stem cells. There are two or three names which have been regularly sending out press releases concerning their research and development (besides ACT, of course). In this case, it’s a company that’s marketing selected umbilical cord blood cells or placental cells. If the … Continue reading

>Texas leads in nanotech armor

>Betterhumans (“forward thinkers discussing, celebrating and creating the future”) reports that another Texas researcher is a leader in biotech. University of Texas’ nanotechnologist Ray Baughman has learned to spin a new yarn from carbon nanotubules. It appears that the yarn contracts when stimulated with electricity and is expected to be strong enough to serve as … Continue reading

>Book Review: Michael Crichton’s NEXT

>“Stroke Damage May Help Smokers Kick the Habit: The insula, an area of the brain largely ignored by researchers, may hold the key to breaking harmful addictions” (Scientific American Science and Technology News, January 25, 2007) “Fresh light thrown on tragic drug trial: Animal tests may have missed danger because monkeys ‘too clean’.” (news@nature.com online, … Continue reading

>The future of stem cells, Texas and politics

>The Friday, January 26, 2007 Austin American Statesman editorial, “Stem cell opposition could steer research away from Texas,” flatly states that Governor Rick Perry’s $3 Billion dollar cancer research initiative won’t help at all if it doesn’t include funding for embryonic stem cell research. The Statesman editors doubt that there will be any scientists to … Continue reading

>Documentation of stem cell cancer link

>From Science Daily, January 22: U.S. scientists have clarified how normal stem cells become cancer stem cells, as well as how cancer stem cells can cause the formation of tumors. Dr. Xi He and associate investigator Linheng Li, both with the Stowers Institute for Medical Research, studied the intestinal system in mice in which one … Continue reading

>WARF relaxes embryonic stem cell fees and rules

>The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation holds the patents on virtually all embryonic stem cells that have ever been produced, that ever will be produced, and of all the technological and medical results of that research. At least according to them, and at least in the United States. And they’ve been sued by other researchers because … Continue reading

>Review of Umbilical Cord Pancreas Cells

>I’ve read the unproofed draft (their English is much better than my Korean) of “Induction of human umbilical cord blood-derived stem cells with embryonic stem cell phenotypes into insulin producing islet-like structure” by B. Sun, et. al. (Biochem. Biophys.Res. Commun. (2007), doi:10.1016/j.bbrc.2007.01.069) The authors do not tell us how much of the insulin-secreting cells or … Continue reading

>UK survey: doctors should probably kill patients

>The British Social Attitudes Survey is being reported in UK papers today as “4 out of 5” and 80% of respondents feel that a doctor should be able to kill patients requesting to be killed and who are going to die anyway. The support for killing goes down if the patient is not likely to … Continue reading

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