Top of the front page and no comments? I take it this is being upvoted by lots of folks like myself that are relative laymen but hopeful that this is a meaningful advance. Won't someone explain the practical significance?
Figuring out all these fine details are likely to lead us to be able to reset our bodies and either drastically extend our lifetimes, or give us a better body in our later years.
This one step might not be part of your medical treatment anytime soon, but we're unlocking fundamental knowledge that we will be wielding, and we don't yet know how powerful that will be.
I believe this (human aging and longevity, biomed) is the most important work.
- "Our work shows that TNT reprogramming is a practical and scalable approach to overcome these intrinsic characteristics of hiPS cells, which is important for the clinical delivery of this technology."
Research on adult stem cells or induced pluripotent stem cells already didn't face the same objections.
It sounds like this is more about an improvement in the technique of inducing pluripotency that could reduce negative complications, rather than a whole new unobjectionable procedure that hadn't existed before.
Thomas predates ESC research by centuries--quite a few of them, actually.
ESC research has always been problematic.
Yes, I am aware that Saint Thomas Aquinas was a medieval theologian and that embryonic stem cell research did not exist at the time.
Maybe you want to argue that there is some necessary connection between ESC research and the period of Church history where the development of Church moral doctrine treats life as beginning with conception. If so, great, argue that. Otherwise, “ESC research has always been problematic” is just a boring claim about the screamingly obvious. Because there are other potential moral or ethical frameworks within which you could evaluate ESC. Or perhaps you would say that those frameworks are not official Church doctrine, thus they’re not Catholic, even if they were taught by saints and Doctors of the Church. If so, you’re also probably the kind of person who says that someone who disagrees with the Church about the morality of contraception isn’t really Catholic, no matter what they say or do on Sundays. But then I congratulate you on erasing the vast majority of Catholics worldwide.
Thomas represented the best of Catholic theology for his time, but it would be monumentally ignorant to act like the Catholic Church is somehow still beholden to the the moral conclusions he drew from incomplete scientific understanding.
> Maybe you want to argue that there is some necessary connection between ESC research and the period of Church history where the development of Church moral doctrine treats life as beginning with conception.
Of course I do. The necessary connection is that that's when ESC was created. It couldn't have been created without the very developments in embryology that rendered Thomas' conclusions moot.
Talk about something so obvious it shouldn't need to be said.
I guess it’s a good thing I didn’t do that, then.
stem cell therapies used to involve extensive selection processes, to harvest cells that develop according to therapeutic goals.
wiping out determined fate, means far less process required, and produces an effectively universal [or near so] stem cell that will be fate determined by surrounding tissue and diffusive signals.