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Burnet said again. He was looking around, through the glass walls of the conference room, at the larger office outside. He saw people walking back and forth. He wondered where his daughter had gone.“I’m nobody,” the young man said. “You never met me. “I’m not talking at all, because you and I have never met,” the man said. “But let’s consider how this might work.”“Okay…”“You can’tlegally sell your cells at this point, because the court has ruled you no longer own them—BioGen does. But your cells could be obtained from other places. Over the course of your life, you’ve given blood many times in many places. You went to Vietnam forty years ago. The
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army took your blood. You had knee surgery twenty years ago in San Diego. The hospital took your blood, and kept your cartilage. You’ve consulted various doctors over the years. They ran blood tests. The labs kept the blood. So your blood can be found, no problem.
And it can be acquired from publicly available databases—if, for example, another company wanted to use your cells.”“And what about BioGen?”The young man shrugged. “Biotechnology is a difficult business. Contaminations happen every day. If something goes wrong in their labs, that’s not your problem, is it?”All we adults have left is adult stem cells, which can make only one kind of tissue. But what if there were a way to convert adult stem cells back into embryonic stem cells? Such a procedure would enable every adult to have a ready source of his or her own
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embryonic stem cells. That would make the therapeutic dream possible.Well, it turns out that youcan reverse adult stem cells, but only if you insert them into an egg. Something within the egg unwinds the differentiation and converts the adult stem cell back into an embryonic stem cell. This is good news, but it is vastly more difficult to do with human cells. And if the method could be made to work in human beings, it would require an enormous supply of human egg cells.
That makes the procedure controversial again.So scientists are looking for other ways to make adult cells pluripotent. It is a worldwide effort. A researcher in Shanghai has been injecting human stem cells into chicken eggs, with mixed results—while others cluck in disapproval. It’s not clear now whether such procedures will work.
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It’s equally unclear whether the stem cell dream—transplants without rejection, spinal cord injuries repaired, and so on—will come true. Advocates have made dishonest claims, and media speculation has been fantastical for years. People with serious illnesses have been led to believe a cure is just around the corner. Sadly, this is not true. Working therapeutic approaches lie many years in the future, perhaps decades. Many thoughtful scientists have said, in private, that we won’t know whether stem cell therapy will work until 2050. They point out that it took forty years from the time Watson and Crick decoded the gene until human gene therapy began.
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