From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@www.aeiveos.com)
Date: Wed Nov 24 1999 - 01:27:53 MST
On Tue, 23 Nov 1999 GBurch1@aol.com wrote:
> I cannot recommend strongly enough the article you'll find at:
>
> http://www.reasonmag.com/9912/fe.rb.petri.html
>
> REASON * December 1999
[snip]
> By Ronald Bailey
>
> "Death to death," declares Gregory Stock, director of UCLA's Program on
> Medicine, Technology, and Society, at a conference on life extension.
Sigh... This is misattributed. "Death to Death" was the second slide
of my Targeting the Nemesis talk that Max asked me to prepare at Extro4.
At any rate, you want to read the article closely. The opponents have
already lost the battle:
"The opponents argue that biotechnologists should concentrate on isolating
and using stem cells known to exist in adults instead. Such adult stem
cells are the precursor cells that renew tissues like skin and the linings
of the intestines, and they likely could be used to regenerate these
tissues. But many researchers believe that adult stem cells won't be as
protean as embryonic cells--that they won't be able to turn into as many
different types of cells."
By allowing that scientists should work with "stem cells known to exist in
adults instead" they have already let the horse out of the barn. All
you do by constraining the federal funding of embryonic work is force
them to focus on the non-embryonic approaches. This is probably a *good*
thing from our perspective. Why? Private industry will focus on the
embryonic approches, but ultimately for ideal organ transplants for
oneself, you want them to start with your own personal stem cells.
If the government researchers focus on this longer term basic
research problem, then by the time private industry has perfected
the organ growth methods, public researchers may have refined the
processes of stem cell isolation from adults. It is far better
to have industry working on the short term problems and government
working on the long term problems instead of both groups focusing
on the short term problems. [As extropians, we should be clever
about seeing if we can use the strategies of our "opponents"
to our advantage. :-)]
Because of Dolly, we *know* it is possible to harvest cells from
adults and generate stem cells from them. What we want to do
is move this from a messy cell manipulation process to a
cleaner molecular signal manipulation process. Then scrape
the inside of your cheek with a toothpick, send it off to OrgansRUs
and get your FedEx Styrofoam container with Vitrified Organs
on Dry Ice back in a month or two.
The article does make a very nice background piece and does
a good job explaining the technologies and hair-splitting
points.
Robert
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