The REAL Promise of Stem CellsSte

Last week, I told you how Oprah's favorite doctor, Dr. Mehmet Oz, said that we were "single digit years" away from cures for multiple diseases including Parkinson's Disease using ADULT stem cell therapies. Well, here are some links that will give you more insight into that claim.

New York Times...

Published: March 5, 2009

In a striking instance of biologists’ new prowess at manipulating human cells, researchers at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Mass., have converted skin cells from people with Parkinson’s disease into the general type of neuron that the disease destroys.

The Globe and Mail (Canada)

March 2, 2009 at 8:00 AM EDT

TORONTO — Canadian researchers have discovered a new way to turn skin cells into stem cells with fewer potential risks to patients.

Their work removes major barriers to using stem cells, which have an endless capacity for self-renewal, in new medical therapies for people with spinal cord injuries or diseases such as diabetes or Parkinson's.

Science News

(Feb. 13, 2009) — A little more than a year after University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists showed they could turn skin cells back into stem cells, they have pulsating proof that these "induced" stem cells can indeed form the specialized cells that make up heart muscle.

In a study published online Feb. 12 in Circulation Research, UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health professor of medicine Tim Kamp and his research team showed that they were able to grow working heart-muscle cells (cardiomyocytes) from induced pluripotent stem cells, known as iPS cells.

The heart cells were originally reprogrammed from human skin cells by James Thomson and Junying Yu, two of Kamp's co-authors on the study.

In fact, the successes are coming so fast and furious that one pro-life site headlined that they were coming "almost too fast to track" You can, however, track many of the news stories on this subject here.

The Center for BioEthics and Human Dignity, produced a report recently that countered a few of the claims made by the pro-embryonic stem cell crowd regarding the "promise" of embryonic stem cells and the real results that adult stem cell research has already shown in those very areas!

The bottom line here is that we appear to be wasting taxpayer (and private research) dollars on the "promise" of embryonic stem cells when the successes (in human trials) are coming from ADULT stem cell cures! Isn't it time we stopped funding an industry that gets it start from the death of a human (or potential human) being? Isn't it time we started working with the proven cures and quit wishing on a fading star?