Saturday, December 17, 2005

Stem Cell Research - Mankind must be still in the Stone Age of this Research



Reading the article Stem Cells and the Experiment That Shook the World, I am thinking we must still be in the flint-shaping age of this, given how crude the tools are. The article describes how James Thomson started his ground-breaking experiment: "With a microscope, a steady hand, and a very thin, hollow glass needle, Thomson removed the clump of cells from inside the sphere and placed them in a laboratory culture dish". Then later, to show the stem cells can be converted into any type of tissue: "...the human cells from the culture dishes and injected them into experimental mice. These mice are engineered to lack an immune system so they do not reject the human cells. Once in the mice, the human cells divided rapidly and formed tumor-like structures made up of all the major human tissue types, including skin, muscle, and bone. "

Excuse me? "steady hand, and hollow needle" and later "inject them into experimental mice" are what it takes to be able to be healing diabetes, spine injuries and who knows what else? Compare those primitive tools with electronic microscopes, particle accelerators and other tools physics uses (or any other branch of science). We are still at the alchymist level here - "pour them together and see what happens". It seems we need a much deeper understanding of these processes and much better tools to take to the next stage. This is just a beginning of a long process!