Science/Technology

The Food and Drug Administration has approved the first-ever human trials of embryonic stem cell research. Scientists at the Geron Corporation will be injecting special nerve cells, developed from human stem cells, into patients who have suffered severe spinal cord injuries. The subjects will be observed to determine both the health effects of the procedure, as well as any improvement in the patients' condition.

President Obama is expected to loosen the restrictions placed on stem cell research under the Bush administration, hopefully opening doors to treatment for Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and other diseases. But what exactly is a stem cell and what are the implications of this research? We got our lovable Q&A team back together to get the answers.

Hey, bro! It's been too long!

No, it hasn't.

Yeah, I totally missed you too, pal. Wow, can you believe Barack Obama is president?

Can we dispense with the idle chit-chat and just get to it? You want to know about stem cell research, right?

Yeah. That's amazing. How did you know th--

It's in the title of this post. I'll try to keep this simple. Stem cells are so-called "blank" cells that can renew themselves and can develop into specialized cells that play a wide variety of roles in the human body.

Great. What does this have to do with killing babies?

Nothing. Embryonic stem cells are taken from embryos that have been fertilized in vitro and donated for research purposes with the informed consent of the donor. Nutty conservatives would have you believe that scientists are ripping babies from their mothers' wombs to be used in a lab. This is simply not the case.

Whoa. You know I believe that every person, no matter how small or stupid, has the right to life as a misguided, ignorant lunatic.

Well, I think on that we can agree.

So why are stem cells such a big deal?

Because many serious medical conditions, such as cancer and birth defects, are due to abnormalities in cell development, scientists hope that by studying the way stem cells differentiate themselves they can understand and perhaps prevent these problems from occurring. Additionally, cell-based therapies may hold the key to treating a host of diseases, including Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases, spinal cord injury, stroke, burns, heart disease, diabetes, osteoarthritis, and rheumatoid arthritis.

Is that all?

No, but those are the ones they listed on the NIH website.

So you mean one day soon there might be a cure for my rheumatoid arthritis?

Well, "soon" is relative. We don't know when treatments and cures will be found, or even if they will be found, but embryonic stem cell research is a huge step in the right direction.

Eh, I don't know. If it's going to take, like, 15 or 20 years to cure Alzheimer's, why even bother, right? Couldn't we use that money for something else, like preventing gay people from getting married?

I'm not sure that's a better use of funds.

Or wait! Even better, let's use that money to develop stem cells that contain the gene for preventing gay people from getting married! Then we won't have to worry about it anymore.

Right.

They can still be gay, of course. Tampering with that would be a tremendous invasion of privacy.

You've clearly given this a lot of thought.

I've been laid off, so I don't have much to do these days.

You had a job?

Yes. Well, six years ago.

Let's wrap it up, shall we?

Fine. So where does Obama fit into all of this?

Barack Obama strongly supports stem cell research and plans to overturn Bush's ban on federal funding, which will hopefully mean the development of more stem cell lines to experiment with.

Let me tell you, I don't have any potential stem cell lines out there...that I know of.

How I've missed these chats.

Posted by: Jason Reich      I’m a fan of Jason Reich