Fight Aging!

You folks may find this of interest: a long MSNBC interview with biologist James Thompson on topics relating to stem cell research. Some of the more interesting items:

Q: How do you respond to the claim that we have these other sources of stem cells - adult stem cells or cord blood - and there's no need to turn to embryonic cells?

A: We don't. The most studied cell in the whole body, in terms of stem cells, is the hematopoietic stem cell. It can't be grown. So what you do when you do a bone marrow transplant is you take some bone marrow out of you - actually, we do peripheral blood - and we put in another patient without expanding it. There's a clinical need for that expansion step, but it can't be done right now. And hundreds of labs for 30 years have studied that adult stem cell, and that's the one we know the most about.

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And again, getting back to the basic science thing: If we study the embryonic stem cells, we learn the basic science. That knowledge is just as likely to be applied to adult stem cells as to the embryonic stem cells. The knowledge goes back and forth. And in the case of the blood, people have failed at growing that cell for three decades. Well, studying that lineage with embryonic stem cells, we might learn the clues to make it growable, and it might be that we still want to use adult stem cells to do that because there are a lot of advantages to that, but the knowledge might come from embryonic stem cells.

Stem cell research really all boils down to a matter of trying to fully understanding and controlling our cells. If researchers can learn to do that, then opportunities to develop cures for aspects of degenerative aging simply fall out of the process.

Q: What are some of those guesses about other technologies?

A: Well, if you take a nucleus and you put it into an oocyte [egg cell], the oocyte knows how to reprogram things. That's a problem that we can study, to understand how that happens. We don't really have a lot of information about how that works, so it's hard to predict how long it's going to take to solve that problem. I'd be surprised if within 10 years we didn't have another way to solve the problem, but it could be that it's a very, very hard problem and it's going to take a long time to do it.

Q: To find a way for a normal cell to reprogram itself?

A: Right. The message of Dolly is less about cloning, that we can clone Dolly or we can clone people or even do nuclear transfer to make embryonic stem cells; it's that the differentiated state is in principle reversible. And while that was known for a lot of model organisms, and there was even some evidence for that in mammals, Dolly really drove the message home that it was simply a question of time before we understood how to do that.

There's much more; it's well worth reading.