A WOMAN has become the first patient in the world to receive an organ created in a laboratory, in a pioneering operation that could change transplant surgery, doctors said yesterday.
Claudia Castillo’s body part was grown using her own stem cells harvested from bone marrow.
Professor Anthony Hollander, part of the team behind the breakthrough, described it as an example of “stem cell science becoming stem cell medicine”.
This was one of the top stories here on the evening news last evening. Read it all.
I had not realized until I did some reading on it just how problematic organ transplants are. These people are on immune-suppressant drugs for the rest of their lives as I recall. This is a wonderful, life-affirming technological advance.
If biotech has not frightened you before, this news should succeed completely. DO you know what door has just been opened? LM
Great news! It made me think of the disclaimer you see at the end of movies – “no animals were harmed in the making of this film.” Now we can say “no embryos were harmed or destroyed in the making of this transplant organ.”
I will say that it’s… interesting… that for all the clamoring about how necessary embryonic stem cell research is… this “world first” was the result of the woman’s [i]own[/i] stem cells being harvested.
Larry #2, I think it may be you who doesn’t know what door has been opened. This woman has a new organ grown from HER OWN cells, not from an embryo’s. Her chances of leading a normal life are very good, which is not the case with ordinary transplants.
This success not only renders the hype from the pro-embryo-research people pointless, but it may help some of us who worry about doctors pushing death before actual death to get organs for transplant.
Ditto #5. Every major scientific advancement to date involving stem cells has involved adult stem cells. There is nothing ethically questionable about this procedure whatsoever.
Just for a start: If you can grow one organ outside the body, you can grow two or three. In fact, if you can grow organs outside the body, you can grow the entire body. I am aware that there is an enormous difference in degree in this statement, but not a difference in kind. Katherine: read Brave New world again. Is this the world you want? For it is coming at you like a freight train (see, in this context e.g., savior siblings and how England has changed what they may be used for, and read the news on recombinant dna, and the successful and profitable cloning of pets. And regenerating mammoths from long dead dna? And what else could this be used for?)
Again, if you can grow tissue transplants in this fashion, will you grow them so that people can in effect regenerate the bodies, organ by organ, so they never have to die? For the first implies the second. For once, stand back and look broadly where biotech is headed, and now consider human nature and its most compelling desires. For the individual, the news is good. For the race, the news is disastrous. We desperately need a Jeremiah who will call us to attention about the old evils of hubris and the ancient vanity of human wishes. Let us change the old phrase a little: Those whom the god will destroy, they first promise life unending.) LM
I’m with Larry #7 on this one. On the one hand, it is wonderful that we can replace diseased organs with fresh ones. On the other hand, it’s scarey that we are one step closer to “creating” a sentient being.
Stem cell research using non embryonic cells is not an ethical issue for me at all. Medical breakthroughs using ethical means are one of God’s miracles. This organ was made with the “core” of an esophogus that was stripped down and regenerated with the woman’s stem cells. Thanks be to God.
Beg pardon Julia, but stem cells are indeed a vital ethical issue because the questions have not been answered :What are you forbidden to use them for? Or can science use them for everything it pleases? Science has repeatedly said, if it can be done, it will be done. And who decides? LM