i wonder if stem-cells could make your dick grow bigger.
i bet they could, but it might be risky since they probably haven't experimented much with that. i think ppl would just get comprehensive medical testing every once in a while so the doc could find out where to have the cells put at if say one of your organs gets a little puny
also, to join you on the preverted side - what about stem cell grown breasts? implants would be sooo out of style when you could have 'real' giant knockers
The first is that many biomedical breakthroughs these days takes years and years to implement. With all the concern about ethics and safety these days, the movement from discovery to implementation has a lot of steps. First youve got all the research discovering the technology, which takes a a bunch of different studies, then youve got to make sure its safe, which can take years for in vivo studies, then youve got to make sure it what it does effectively fixes the problem through further animal tests, then finally clinical trials. Stem cells are particularly tricky, and can be really nasty if something goes wrong.
Gone are the days of Edward Jenner style avant garde medical research when you would just test the stuff on some peasants. The fact that stem cells are hard to control doesnt help it either.
The other thing is the limitations of the stem cells themselves. Its not my forte, but i did look for a nice review article.
Stem Cells: Promises Versus Limitations
DESPOINA M. CHOUMERIANOU, Ph.D., HELEN DIMITRIOU, Ph.D.,and MARIA KALMANTI, M.D., Ph.D.
TISSUE ENGINEERING: Part B
Volume 14, Number 1, 2008
LIMITATIONS AND CHALLENGES
With only a few exceptions, adult stem cells are difficult
to expand in culture, and multipotency is a property that
remains mostly observed in vivo, whereas ESCs show a
remarkable capacity to differentiate into a wide range of
cell types in vitro.44,45 Most human ESC lines have a
normal karyotype. Chromosomal abnormalities are common
in embryonal carcinomal cells and mouse ESCs, and
karyotypic changes often enhance their proliferative capacity
while shortening the population doubling time. Such
epigenetic changes are associated with prolonged culture of
ESCs46,47 and are observed not only in naturally occurring
ESCs, but also in ESCs cloned using SCNT.48 It has also
been reported that the acquisition of chromosomal abnormalities
may be related to the laboratory manipulations of
cells.11 More specifically, Drapper et al. showed that trisomies
12 and 17 were observed when colonies were disaggregated
to single cells, whereas manual passaging of
cultures contributed to the long-term maintenance of normal
karyotypes.46 Established cell lines must be maintained
under stringent culture conditions and be checked often for
the acquisition of chromosomal abnormalities, although the
incidence of such instability is not fully understood.
Another issue that needs to be considered, before the
administration of functional cell populations in vivo, is the
type and number of cells delivered at the site of engraftment
and the prevention of teratoma formation due to
contamination of the graft with remaining undifferentiated
ESCs. To circumvent the risk of teratoma formation, it is
proposed that the number of undifferentiated cells within
the graft should be reduced and highly purified in order to
contain only the cells destined to replace the diseased tissue.
Cell surface markers could be used in flow-sorting protocols
that are successfully tested and believed to eliminate
the number of undifferentiated cells,49 as well as in protocols
leading to high yield of differentiated cells.50
Following their derivation, human ESCs are cultured on
feeder layers, which provide support for growth, maintain
their pluripotency, and prevent spontaneous differentiation.
51 Nevertheless, during this process, the use of animal
serum may result in cross-species contamination with foreign
pathogens and compromise their use in clinical applications.
To overcome this drawback, efforts are being made
to produce feeder layers from human fetal muscle, skin, or
fallopian tubes.52 An alternative method is to culture human
ESCs on extracellular matrices, without any direct
contact with feeder layers, in the presence of a conditioned
medium obtained from fibroblast cultures.53 These latter culture
conditions are attractive, with a view to the therapeutic
use of human ESCs. More recent reports describe the development
of TeSR1, a serum-free, animal product–free
medium that supports the derivation and long-term feederindependent
culture of human ESCs. Its modification, with
certain proteins and growth factors, makes TeSR1 suitable
for use in routine research for standard human ESC cultures.
54 Additionally, feeder-independent human ESC culture
conditions have been described that include protein
components solely derived from recombinant sources or
purified from human material and the derivation of 2 new
human ESC lines in these defined culture conditions.55
Additionally, combining culture media with dish-coating
factors has given encouraging results toward the production
of culture systems of undifferentiated ESCs that are pathogen
free.56 Allogeneic ESC transplantation may result in graft rejection
and therefore may require lifelong immunosuppression.
56 CHOUMERIANOU ET AL.
However, co-transplantation of the graft with hematopoietic
stem cells can induce lifelong tolerance to the graft.57
An alternative choice would be SCNT, with which it would
be possible to generate autologous cells and eliminate the
risks of graft rejection.8 The process of SCNT was the first to
show that reprogramming of cells was possible by transferring
the nuclear material of somatic cells to oocytes. A few
years later, scientists succeeded in fusing human ESCs with
human fibroblasts or human thymocytes.58,59 The resulting
hybrid cells had a stable tetraploid DNA content, and the
morphology, growth rate, and antigen expression patterns
were characteristic of human ESCs. By this method, it is
shown that human ESCs can reprogram the transcriptional
state of somatic nuclei.59 Moreover, pluripotent stem cells
from mouse embryonic or adult fibroblasts were induced by
introducing Oct3/4, Sox2, c-Myc, and Klf4 under ESC culture
conditions and as a result, exhibited the morphology
and growth properties of ESCs and expressed ESC markers.
However, they had different gene-expression and DNAmethylation
profiles and failed to produce adult chimeras.60
Although these first findings indicated that pluripotent stem
cells can be directly generated from fibroblast cultures by the
addition of only a few defined factors, more experiments that
followed revealed that the introduction of c-Myc should be
avoided for clinical application because the development of
tumors is correlated with its presence.61
I just bolded the stuff that seemed like obvious limitations. Of course, theres lots of proposed ways of dealing some of the problems, but that ties in with the first point about requiring a good degree of certainty about the safety and efficacy.
I guess youve also got the stuff about ethics and the government being a nigger about using them, but i dont know much about the current state of that. I had a class one day where the prof said in passing that there are a few spinal rehab clinics in China that use stem cells with pretty good results, although im not too familiar with them.
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