Med Student Rescues Body Part From Airport Security | Hacker News Reader

Med Student Rescues Body Part From Airport Security

npr.org

108 pointscolinprince39 comments

I was reading this like any other ordinary story. Then I got to this part:

    Amazingly, he doesn't do transplants anymore. 
    Tracheas, he has decided, can be regenerated 
    from scratch, using stem cells.

It brought tears to my eyes. No amount of bad news can weaken the beauty contained in that little paragraph. This made my day, really.

There are so many angles to this story that involve the tension between the forces of conservative thinking, and innovators who are trying to make the world a better place. Ignore the idiotic airport security problem, and you're still left with an amazing, improbable story about the world-changing consequences of an emerging technology that religious luddites keep trying to destroy.

Only a few short years ago, our society was getting its collective panties in a knot over the ethics of stem cell research. The US president made a strong movement to kill that research in the womb (pardon the pun). At the time, nobody could convincingly enumerate the medical benefits of the work...because it was research. Now we're synthesizing body parts. Amazing. How many years of human life will be saved? There's no upper limit. "Pro-life", indeed.

Save this story, and use it the next time you're in an argument with someone who wants to stop pure intellectual exploration in the name of vague, supernatural objections.

(Edit: Yes, these particular organs are being synthesized from adult stem cells, not embryonic stem cells. But it's a distinction without a difference -- we cannot predict what advancements or understanding will come from any given line of research. The argument is greater than the adjective.)

These aren't embryonic stem cells. No one has a problem with adult stem cells (well, I suppose the folks who refuse all forms of medical treatment might).

"No one has a problem with adult stem cells."

Untrue. There are/were plenty of groups who object to all stem cell research. Embryonic cells are just the most controversial segment. (Consider this thought experiment: take a fully differentiated human cell, and transform it such that it is capable of generating a embryo. Do you think this won't generate objections on religious grounds?)

The heart of the debate is that our knowledge is pushing relentlessly against the darkness of superstition, and that makes some people uncomfortable -- just as every scientific advancement has made people uncomfortable. We're just in a sad period where these people have greater influence over our society's decisions.

"There are/were plenty of groups who object to all stem cell research."

Can you name a few? Thanks. To the best of my knowledge, no major religious group opposes adult stem cell research.

How about bishops in the Catholic Church?

http://www.lifenews.com/2006/08/23/bio-1727/

'Richard Doerflinger of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, an expert on bioethics issues, told the Associated Press the research "raises more ethical questions than it answers."..."It is widely believed that one cell of a very early embryo may separate and become a new embryo, an identical twin," Doerflinger told the Associated Press.'

Here's another response to the same experiment, which better captures the root of the objections:

http://cathnews.acu.edu.au/608/140.html

'"Regardless of the speculated benefits, no human being, particularly the most vulnerable, should be treated as raw material which we can manipulate and manufacture," Mr O'Gorman said.'

That has nothing whatsoever to do with adult stem cells.

Did you miss the part that was talking about embryos or what?

Update: try this http://www.catholic.org/international/international_story.ph...

If you think the Catholic Church is opposed to adult stem cell research, you're simply misinformed.

It has everything to do with them: there's no such thing as an "adult" stem cell. There are only differentiated and undifferentiated cells, and "embryonic" is a useful description only insofar as it describes the source of origin of an established cell line. The techniques that those quotes were concerning don't destroy embryos -- they turn differentiated cells into undifferentiated cells -- but that's enough to trigger the objections.

Said another way, there's no fundamental reason that "adult" stem can't be converted to an "embryonic" state. And the quotes above illustrate that once you do that, you run afoul of the opponents. The religious groups don't want to prohibit "embryonic" stem cell research; they want to prevent anyone from doing any sort of science that they perceive to be in violation of their notion of human-being-ness. Science doesn't support the distinctions that they're making, and therefore, the conflict is unresolvable.

Now you're just arguing for the purpose of arguing.

The official doctrine of the Catholic Church supports adult stem cell research. That's just a fact. Sorry.

Pluipotent stem cells are very cool, but they can't make an embryo. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_potency

I am 99% sure the distinction, as it matters to the Catholic Church or anyone else using the term, is that “embryonic” refers to having been harvested from an embryo.

You completely misread his question. He wasn't referring to embryonic stem cells at all. I think hardly anyone has a problem with using something like mesenchymal stem cells for cartilage regeneration (well, the FDA maybe, but that's a different story).

> We're just in a sad period where these people have greater influence over our society's decisions.

Greater than when, exactly? Things could be a lot worse.

The security professions need to learn a lesson which doctors have understood for some time now: treating everyone for a rare threat does more harm than good.

Suppose there is a drug which prevents heart attacks, but due to side effects, rare reactions, or just plain error, causes damage to a small proportion of people. If you have a 50% chance of a heart attack, taking it would be a good bet. But giving the same drug to everyone would be a medical disaster. Any treatment you give to a broad population had better be extraordinarily safe. The rarer the threat you are trying to address, the more easily you can do more harm than good.

Terrorism is rare.

I think there is a flip side of it too:

Fliers need to make it clear that they are OK with the fact that if they want to be treated better, security will not catch all security risks.

Yes and no. Think of it this way: if you have a graph of security against cost, there is a line which represents possible tradeoffs of best security for a given cost. You are saying, we need to think about where we want to be on the line. I don't think we are even on the line.

That's true when the risks outweigh the benefits, but it's not always true otherwise: we vaccinate everyone against smallpox to -keep- it rare!

Unfortunately, the cost of removing this sort of security theater as a deterrent is invisible and hypothetical, whereas the benefits are obvious.

"The security professions need to learn a lesson which doctors have understood for some time now: treating everyone for a rare threat does more harm than good."

Nanny states need to learn this principle too: "First do no harm".

We are starting to see glimpses of the hidden costs of airport security. Consider just that by discouraging flight, more people end up dead on the (vastly more) insecure roads.

i think there's a lesson here in risk management. the obviously brilliant doctor failed to put care and attention into the mundane delivery part of the process. there are no small details. Jet Star is a low price, zero premium service. for the cash/time invested, they should have being going business class with a premium airline, a signed piece of letterhead and if possible, hired an airline rep to walk them in one airport and out the other. someone's life hung on the balance of a student knowing a pilot...

To quote, "That done, Birchall's team booked the only direct flight from Bristol to Barcelona, operated by an airline called easyJet." Thus, your "business class with a premium airline" doesn't (appear) to have been feasible.

Bristol is only 2 hours drive from London.

Strange that the article title refers to a bit of high drama rather than "we can make replacement tracheas from scratch now!"

It is a sad day that speaks volumes about the world we live in now, that we encounter an article on such an important, ground-breaking topic, and it's titled 'Airport security refuses transport'.

When was the world not like this?

Approximately eleven years ago.

Actually, they would have been fine six years ago - the liquid ban only came into force in 2006.

And the EU would very much like to lift the ban, because it's completely pointless - it's meant to be lifted on EU flights in April 2013. Except both the US and the aviation industry is heavily lobbying for the EU to scrap their plans, for 'security' reasons (if you were cynical you might suggest budget airlines and airports benefitted from a liquids ban, as people had to spend money in airports/on planes rather than bringing their own refreshments etc).

Mhm, I was more alluding to the media and sensationalist and misleading headlines, but I get your point.

It's possible to have multiple news articles concentrating on different aspects of the same event. I bet there are other articles out there that concentrate on the medical research. Not everything out there has to cover only the most important stuff.

A quick search through Google News says those hypothetical articles are rather hard to find.

Try searching 2008, when the procedure actually occurred, and you'll find quite a few.

The article itself is more about the medical aspect than the 'saved-by-the-friend' aspect.

Previous submission, no comments:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4135224

(Neither this nor the previous submission submitted the canonical URL, which helps the HN duplicated detector do its job.)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4111691

I hadn't seen it before. Reposts are not necessarily bad, if there are no comments, nobody saw the post, thus a repost is necessary. Perhaps the de-dup mechanism shouldn't incorporate comment-less posts as part of its data set.

Med student rescues body part? More like German pilot.

Or Med student who knows the right person.

This is what highly-connected networks of ridiculously rich and privileged people are actually good for!

True, although in the UK, there is no reason to believe that a med student is "ridiculously rich and privileged".

The stem cell century accelerates.

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