The claim comes from Dr Mark Cregan, medical director at Swiss healthcare company Medela, who admits that it's based on "very preliminary evidence." Not that that's stopping him from saying that the discovery demonstrates that breast milk helps a newborn child "fulfil its genetic destiny":

Breast milk is the only adult tissue where more than one type of stem cell has been discovered. That is very unique and implies a lot about the impressive bioactivity of breast milk and the consequential benefits to the breastfed infant... It's quite possible that immune cells in breast milk can survive digestion and end up in the infant's circulation. This has been shown to be occurring in animals, and so it would be unsurprising if this was also occurring in human infants.

If these benefits turn out to be true, then it might lead more mothers to breastfeed; according to the World Health Organization, only 3% of mothers worldwide exclusively breastfeed currently, leading to a generation who'll sadly be too weak to fight off the Terminators they'll have to deal with.

Stem cells could be the secret reason why breast is best [Independent.co.uk]

This week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a group of researchers announced that they've figured out how to turn human fat cells into stem cells. According to a release about their work:

The researchers isolated adipose [fat] cells from adults between the ages of 45 and 60 and attempted to reprogram the cells into stem cells using an established genetic targeting method. At the same time, the authors began the same procedure with adult skin cells. The adipose cells produced adult stem cells nearly twice as fast and approximately 20 times more efficiently than skin cells.

Above, you can see a stem cell colony growing from fat cells. It's difficult to get stem cells because most of them come from embryos, which triggers both logistical and ethical problems for researchers. Scientists have had some luck reprogramming adult skin cells to become stem cells, but unfortunately (as these researchers demonstrated again) the method isn't reliable. Now the search for an endless supply of stem cells could be over. Joseph Wu, who led the study, told the Telegraph:

Not only can we start with a lot of cells, we can reprogram them much more efficiently. Fibroblasts, or skin cells, must be grown in the lab for three weeks or more before they can be reprogrammed. But these stem cells from fat are ready to go right away.

It turns out all those fattening foods may actually cure disease after all. Just liposuction your fat out, reprogram the cells to be stem cells, and grow yourself some new, unclogged arteries and a brand-new heart.

via PNAS

An opinion piece by medical researchers Olle Lindvall and Insoo Hyun published today in Science suggests stem-cell tourism is only likely to grow bigger as the general public learns more about the promise of stem-cell therapies. Unfortunately,there are very few vetted stem-cell treatments. And in many countries like the United States such treatments are often banned by law.

That's why clinics in countries with few regulations, like Russia and China, attract stem-cell tourists in droves. Often, these clinics promise cures that are based on nothing but wishful thinking. Such was the case with the boy who had a neuro-degenerative disease and received stem-cell injections in Russia. His parents were fooled by false advertising into believing that stem cells could cure him. The clinicians merely injected his brain with fetal stem cells and sent him home to Israel. There he began to develop brain tumors and tumors in his spine. His doctor speculated that possibly the problem was that the Russian clinic had treated the cells with something to make them grow in culture, and that caused them to grow irregularly when injected into the boy.

Though this is a sad story, Lindvall and Hyun urge scientists not to dismiss stem cell tourism out of hand. Today it might not be the right treatment, but they say in the near future it may represent the forefront of medical innovation. Specifically, it provides a way for terminally ill patients to participate in innovative therapies that have not yet gone through any clinical trials. The difficult thing is figuring out which therapies are legitimate, and which are like those suffered by the boy with brain tumors.

Lindvall and Hyun say that a legit stem-cell therapy has to be peer reviewed, based in sound scientific reasoning, and must have been tested in animals without adverse side effects. Of course, in countries where there is very little medical regulation it is unclear what peer review might mean. Also, as computer simulations of biological processes get better, it's possible that no animal trials would be necessary.

It seems that Lindvall and Hyun are taking a "we know it when we see it" approach to this problem. In other words, they know a promising it stem-cell therapy when they see it; everything else is balderdash. Unless, of course, it turns out to be a brilliant new innovation. Perhaps their boldest statement is that stem-cell tourism has its place in medical science. It could be seen as an unofficial first clinical trial.

What's certain is that we're likely to see more and more cases of stem-cell quackery. Every medical technology, no matter how sophisticated, has its basement practitioners. The weird part is that sometimes basement laboratories are the best place for science to progress.

via Science

Also, it's interesting to note that late last year the International Society for Stem Cell research published a set of guidelines for people considering stem cell tourism.

Controlling Stem Cells

This morning Cell magazine published an intriguing article about a breakthrough made by several American scientists researching how stem cells get made. There is a small family of genes responsible for keeping stem cells "pluripotent," a state which allows the cell to turn into almost any other cell. Maintaining pluripotency is crucial for stem cell therapy.

Even more important is discovering how to restore pluripotency to cells that have already differentiated into a neurons or skin cells. Stem cells taken from blastocysts, or embryos, are pluripotent. But there is a limited supply of such cells for both practical and policy reasons (regulations against using embryos in experiments, for instance). So one of the gold rings of the stem cell research community is discovering how to make differentiated cells pluripotent agian.

And that's where today's discovery comes in. The research team led by UC Santa Barbara's Na Xu discovered that the family of genes which turns a stem cell pluripotent are themselves regulated by a small molecule called micro-RNA. They located the exact kind of micro-RNA responsible for controlling these stem cell genes, called miR-145. A rise in levels of miR-145 causes stem cells to differentiated. So keeping levels of miR-145 low may allow researchers more granular control of the pluripotency of cells.

The bottom line: Researchers have more control than ever over the process that turns ordinary cells into pluripotent stem cells and maintains them in that state. We've tightened our grip on the on/off switch for pluripotency.

via Cell (for a layperson's summary, see Eurekalert!)

Experimenting with Stem Cell Therapies

Great strides are also being made in applied therapies, too. This week H+ published an intriguing interview with Sean Hu, the head of a Chinese lab where people come from all over the world to get controversial treatments with stem cells drawn from umbilical cord blood. Hu founded Beike Biotechnology, located in Shenzhen, where he says doctors have had success in treating blindness caused by damaged optical nerves:

There have been many successful stories of stem cell therapy (SCT). One example is the recovery of a nearly blind sixteen-year-old girl, Macie Morse, who recently got her learner's permit and started driving. She came to one of our hospitals for treatment in July 2006, with 20/4,000 vision in one eye and only light perception in the other due to optic nerve hypoplasia. After treatment, Macie now has 20/80 vision in one eye and 20/400-plus in the other!

While the breakthroughs at Beike are not quite as spectacular as some excitable bloggers have suggested, the lab is part of a new wave of research centers that are already putting into practice some of the discoveries that rarely make it out of university labs in the West.

The bottom line: Beike Biotechnology and similar companies like Osiris and Geron are making strides towards applying stem cell therapies in the human population. It's likely that breakthroughs will come out of labs like these, where doctors are already working with human subjects.

via H+

Image of stem cells via University of Kansas Medical Center.

Researchers at Northwestern University have recently conducted a Phase II trial on a novel stem cell therapy for angina. One of the reasons why angina causes pain is that the clogged arteries deprive your heart muscles of oxygenated blood. When you run or exert yourself, your chest aches to let you know that your heart isn't receiving enough oxygen to function. Prolonged deprivation of oxygen also shuts down parts of the heart muscle entirely.

The Northewestern team hoped to use adult stem cells to strengthen the muscle tissues in the heart that are being shut down. So they used stem cells created by the patients' bone marrow, first filtering those stem cells out of the patients' bloodstreams and then injecting them directly into patients' hearts. This treatment is referred to as using "autologous stem cells," or stem cells from the person being treated (other treatments often use stem cells from donors).

Here are the technical details, according to a release from the University:

All patients were given a drug to stimulate release of CD34+ adult stem cells from the bone marrow, and these cells were then collected from the bloodstream using a process called apheresis. The CD34+ cells were then separated from the other blood components . . . The CD34+ adult stem cells were injected into 10 locations in the heart muscle of patients in the treatment group. Patients in the placebo group received saline. A sophisticated electromechanical mapping technology identified where the heart muscle was alive but not functioning, because it was not receiving enough blood supply.

The best part? The treatment worked.

According to Northwestern:

Six months after the procedure, the autologous stem cell transplant patients were able to walk longer (average of 60 seconds) on a treadmill than the placebo group. It also took longer until they experienced angina pain on a treadmill compared to the placebo group and, when they felt pain, it went away faster with rest. In addition, they had a reduction of episodes of chest pain compared to the control group.

Though these findings are preliminary - this is only stage two of a four-phase trial - Northwestern's findings bode well for the use of autologous stem cell treatments. I'd like to know more about whether the parts of the heart that had shut down were functioning again. Or was the pain lessened for some other reason?

via Northwestern University

Researchers announced this week in Lancet that, four months ago, Claudia Castillo received a rare trachea transplant. Castillo’s original windpipe was damaged by tuberculosis, and an international team of European researchers harvested stem cells from her bone marrow to grow the new trachea. Castillo’s body readily accepted the transplant without the use of immunosuppressants.

"They have created a functional, biological structure that can't be rejected," said Dr. Allan Kirk of the American Society of Transplantation. "It's an important advance, but constructing an entire organ is still a long way off."

Although we may not be seeing lab-grown kidneys and livers in the near future, Patrick Warnke, a surgeon at the University of Kiel in Germany, is currently working on a way to grow faces from patients’ own stem cells. Four years ago, Warnke was part of a team that created and transplanted a jawbone made from titanium, protein, and stem cells. Although face transplants from donors have been somewhat successful, Warnke has expressed his concern that recipients’ immune systems might reject the faces down the line. But he is encouraged by the success of the trachea transplant:

“Patients engineering their own tissues is the key way forward…[W]e need pioneering approaches like this to solve the problem.”

Doctors transplant windpipe with stem cells [AP]

Obama promises that the space council will report directly to the president, meaning this group will have direct access to him during policy decisions about space and the skies. He said:

Between 1958 and 1973, the National Aeronautics and Space Council oversaw the entire space arena for four presidents; the Council was briefly revived from 1989 to 1992. I will re-establish this Council reporting to the president. It will oversee and coordinate civilian, military, commercial, and national security space activities.

In an interesting move, Obama promises to create a "Chief Technology Officer" position — unclear where, or what kind of power the appointee will have. Will this be a cabinet position? Will the CTO actually be able to do anything helpful if he or she is merely doing "interagency" liason stuff? Here's Obama's description of the job, which sounds pretty thankless:

The nation’s first Chief Technology Officer (CTO) [will] ensure that our government and all its agencies have the right infrastructure, policies and services for the 21st century. The CTO will lead an interagency effort on best-in-class technologies, sharing of best practices, and safeguarding of our networks;

One of the best pieces of news I've heard about Obama is that he plans to recreate the post of science advisor to the president, a position that disappeared during the Bush Administration. Obama says:

[I will] strengthen the role of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) by appointing experts who are charged to provide independent advice on critical issues of science and technology. The PCAST will once again be advisory to the president.

And here's a weird one. Broadband internet for everybody? A router in every pot? He says:

My proposals for providing broadband Internet connections for all Americans across the country will help ensure that more students are able to bolster their [science, technology, engineering and math] achievement.

Really? How is he going to provide internet connections for "all Americans"? Is he talking about the free wifi at McDonalds?

Obama is still claiming he supports environmentally-friendly energy and emissions-reduction:

Specifically, I will implement a market-based cap-and-trade system to reduce carbon emissions by the amount scientists say is necessary: 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. I will start reducing emissions immediately by establishing strong annual reduction targets with an intermediate goal of reducing emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.

It's great that Obama says that he supports nuclear energy. Also:

I will also work closely with utilities to introduce a digital smart grid that can optimize the overall efficiency of the nation's electric utility system, by managing demand and making effective use of renewable energy and energy storage.

What the hell is a "digital smart grid"? Maybe Obama should have consulted with his CTO before using terms like "digital smart grid."

I love Obama's weirdly wonky comments about rDNA. Did the Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee help him with this one? He says:

The promise of rDNA is its ability to sidestep potentially harmful intermediaries that could have a pathogenic effect. Some forms of gene therapy-replacing faulty genes with functional copies-in comparison have encountered safety issues that arise from how the functional gene is delivered. As a result, the NIH established the Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee, which now provides advice and guidance on human gene therapy as well as other ethical concerns or potential abuse of rDNA technology. Until we are equipped to ascertain the safety of such methods, I will continue to support the activities and recommendations of the Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee.

Also, not surprisingly, Obama will lift the ban on federal funding for most stem cell research:

As president, I will lift the current administration’s ban on federal funding of research on embryonic stem cell lines created after August 9, 2001 through executive order, and I will ensure that all research on stem cells is conducted ethically and with rigorous oversight . . . I believe that it is ethical to use these extra embryos for research that could save lives when they are freely donated for that express purpose.

No word on his policies about clone armies. Republican candidate John McCain has promised to answer Science Debate 2008's questions too, so look out for that soon. Image via SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images.

Science Debate 2008 [via Wired]

In 2004 and 2005 Hwang was regarded as top mind in human cloning. His research seemed to show that he'd been able to clone human embryonic stem cells, a huge accomplishment that would open the door to a new era in cloning and medicine.

That all changed in 2006 when news surfaced that he had fabricated his data and unethically obtained eggs from female researchers working in his lab. Disgraced, he left his prestigious position in academia to go work in animal cloning.

And now he's back, promising to keep your beloved K-9 around in cloned perpetuity for nothing more than a huge outlay of cash. Nevermind that he's already shown himself to be an utterly unethical scientist who will stop at nothing for personal gain (that says something abut the BioArts International's CEO Lou Hawthorne, too, who's got three copies of his dog Missy, pictured). Nevermind the valuable lessons Arnold Schwarzenegger tried to teach us all about the evils of cloning pets in the movie "The Sixth Day."

What's important, Hwang and Hawthorne are telling us, is that instead of saying goodbye to our pets, they can effectively live forever. Profit motive aside, I'm not sure if this is a good thing or not.

Source: Associated Press

Try BioTime, a company that promises to start selling "human embryonic progenitor" stem cells "to scientists" any day now. International Stem Cell Corporation already supplies bulk orders of stem cells to its partner companies. If you manage to get one of these companies to send you some stem cells, send us an email with some proof and we'll write all about it.

According to a Wired Science story:

With the right coaxing, stem cells can turn into almost any kind of tissue, but first they must be grown into clusters called embryoid bodies. Taking care of those cells is a real hassle. They are usually grown in plastic plates with hundreds of deep wells, and the fluid in each one must be changed individually every day.

Using Shrinky Dinks as a mould, Khine and her team cast tiny rubber plates that serve as an ideal nest for stem cells as they develop into embryoid bodies. Because they are so small, and a bit sticky, changing the broth can be done with one quick squirt of a pipette.

How to Grow Stem Cells with a Plastic Toy [Wired Science]

Though their methods are far from perfect, this breakthrough could help replace dead or damaged brain cells in people suffering from Alzheimer's as well as any type of injury. It's just a matter of extending the brain's natural self-healing powers.

According to an article in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science today:

Magdalena Götz and colleagues found that cells called astrocytes expand and multiply after brain injury. The authors induced brain injury in mice, then observed as quiescent astrocytes activated themselves and became reactive, causing reactive gliosis, which is the universal cellular reaction to brain injury. The researchers found that the reactive astrocytes remained astrocytes in the cerebral cortex, whereas in a cell culture they could be coaxed to switch to different brain cell types, including neurons. These results identify astrocytes as a source of stem cells in the injury site and show that other types of brain cells do not have this potential. The authors conclude that the cells provide a promising cell type to initiate repair in humans after brain injury.

According to a story in Reuters:

Researchers said on Friday the breakthrough opened up new ways to treat severe tissue damage and made the prospect of custom-made living spare parts for humans a step closer to reality. [Lead researcher Riitta Suuronen] and her colleagues . . . isolated stem cells from the patient's fat and grew them for two weeks in a specially formulated nutritious soup that included the patient's own blood serum.

In this case they identified and pulled out cells called mesenchymal stem cells — immature cells than can give rise to bone, muscle or blood vessels. When they had enough cells to work with, they attached them to a scaffold made out of a calcium phosphate biomaterial and then put it inside the patient's abdomen to grow for nine months. The cells turned into a variety of tissues and even produced blood vessels, the researchers said. The block was later transplanted into the patient's head and connected to the skull bone using screws and microsurgery to connect arteries and veins to the vessels of the neck.

Finnish Patient Gets New Jaw [Reuters]

According to an article in Scientific American:

The [research] group says the embryos survived the removal of a blastomere [cell] or two and grew normally to the 10-cell stage 80 percent of the time, the same rate as untouched IVF (in vitro fertilization) embryos. IVF doctors routinely take single cells from embryos to check for genetic diseases before implanting them in the womb. "If we base this on objective scientific criteria, there's no evidence that removing a single blastomere harms the embryo," says Robert Lanza, ACT's chief scientific officer. The frozen embryos were set to be discarded by IVF clinics, but donor couples instead consented to their use for research.

Embryos Survive Stem Cell Harvest [Scientific American]

Robots are getting down all over the place in Japan. The i-Sobot and the Asimo are both dancing maniacs. Robots are shredding the violin strings and tossing old people like dolls.

The 2007 Robot Of The Year awards featured a Japanese surgical bot that can operate while the patient is inside an MRI. Photo by Junko Yagami, Getty Images.

Architecture is so much more radical in places like the United Arab Emirates, which is developing the next generation of sleek towers. Look at the mixed-use Tameer Towers, which uses locally cast light concrete and natural shade. The UAE recently came up with the idea of a "Cool City," which would use 60 percent less energy than other cities using renewable power and efficient waste management. Then there's that giant sail-shaped building. And The Pad, featured up top, just won Best International Apartment for 2007.

Maglev trains now link Shanghai's subway with its airport, and Mumbai is considering spending $7.56 billion to build 16 to 30 miles of high-speed maglev tracks linking the city with its suburbs. A maglev train uses magnetism to lift the train a small distance above its elevated track, and they featured prominently in the 1950s scifi comic Magnus Robot Fighter. Nowadays, when Mumbai imagines becoming a futuristic city, it looks with envy towards Shanghai. And so does Paris Hilton.

Maglev train outside Shanghai.

European fashion is coming up with designs that can keep you safer as well as looking studly. Just check out this solar-powered ski suit, which uses a special thin film technology to power "Golden Dragon" LEDs that light up at night. It should reduce collisions as well as making you look like a raver on ice.

And then there's stem cells. While the U.S. government continues to try to baptize the little fellers, leading researcher Alan Colman just announced he'll divide his time between cutting-edge stem cell facilities in London and Singapore. Colman, of course, is the man who cloned Dolly the Sheep.

So the U.S. really needs to step up its game. We should be putting people on Mars, creating robot break-dancers and pioneering new green cities linked by high-speed rail. Otherwise, we're collectively going to turn into that old guy who wears his pants under his armpits and shakes his head at all this new fancy whiz-buggery. And nobody wants that, except a handful of armpit-pants fetishists.

What was it in the novel that made Bush change the course of the nation's scientific research, putting the U.S. several years behind Europe and Asia? Apparently Bush adviser Jay Lefkowitz read the President a passage from the novel about genetically-engineered babies being grown in womb factories and Bush got really quiet and upset. He seemed to think there was a direct connection between stem cell research and wholesale government control of future generations' genetic code. What he didn't realize was that the genome hacking in Brave New World is actually done to prevent the need for welfare and other pesky social programs that Bush hates — all the working class people are designed to be strong, stupid, and enjoy manual labor so they never get annoyed by working at McDonalds. And they never demand libraries or healthcare.

Just goes to show that you can write a leftist scifi critique of government authoritarianism, and still wind up inspiring the very authoritarians you hoped to undermine. Maybe Huxley will have the last laugh, though. By retarding our progress in medical science so much, Bush has probably done more to make the U.S. irrelevant to the future than any other leader has. (Except perhaps Reagan, whose military policies were inspired by Star Wars.)

Dystopian Scifi Shapes White House Stem Cell Policy [via Carpetbagger Report]

• It's official: the Earth is getting more tropical. Global warming has expanded the tropical band around the center of the planet over the past two decades, and it looks like it will expand more over the next century. [Reuters]
• Researchers repaired major skull damage in mice using human embryonic stem cells. They grew new bone on a special tissue-engineering edifice and popped it right into the mouse skulls. So stem cells are good for something, after all. [Science Daily] Why chimps are smarter than humans and dinosaurs had hooves after the jump.

• Get humble, homo sapiens. We may have invented cars, but chimps remember numbers better than humans do in a simple memory test. [New Scientist]
  
• A sixteen-year-old dinosaur enthusiast discovered the frozen, mummified remains of a dinosaur in Montana, complete with muscle tissue and skin. That was back in 1999, and now the high-tech paleontological research is in. Turns out this dino had hooves and scales [National Geographic].
  
• In England, the National Lottery funded a psychology research study which proved that money doesn't make people happy. Not exactly the outcome the Lottery was hoping for, I'd wager. [Science Daily]