Wash this reactionary's mouth out with soap!

Bioethics.net compares the Bush administration's happiness about reprogrammed adult stem cells with that man, Mr. Clinton's, "I did not have sex with that woman!" and President Bush's statement "Mission accomplished," after our US troops captured Baghdad.

I'll accept the latter (at some future date, if the evidence supports it), but the first is at least as false as Clinton's wagging finger - and (speaking of Yuk factors) did we really need to be reminded of that?

The author, James W. Fossett (who is anything but "non-partisan") states that Yamanaka, the first to report reprogrammed adult cells in humans and mice is from Japan and wasn't affected by the US Federal funding limitations. He doesn't mention that Yamanaka's research didn't rely on the use of new embryonic cells, at all. Yamanaka took the information gleaned from animal research and the currently funded cells and moved to the front of all other stem cell researchers by pointing the way to the key to the production of stem cells from each patient who needs them - from his or her own cells.

Instead, Fossett is running scared due to the "rhetorical parity" from cell reprogramming and the possibility that the success in reprogramming cells will result in more reprogramming research!

Fossett doesn't mention that James Thomson's research using human Embryonic Stem cells (hESC). then human fetal cells harvested after abortions - and finally in skin cells harvested at circumcision of little boys - was funded by the National Institutes of Health, and that those hESC are the ones that supposedly are of no use.

Fossett also fails to mention of the new report by Yamanaka on the technique using only 3 inserted genes to the prior 4, and that the eliminated gene is the one that had scientists concerned about cancers.

I'm sure that he doesn't recall the "first transplantable lung cells" from hESC's by Texas researchers last year. These cells were developed by viral "transfection," also, and were lauded as "a platform that could potentially be useful in the development of spinal cord cells, heart cells, nerve cells and others.” These were neither the first or transplantable, but they did get much more notice than similar cells developed from umbilical cord blood cells without viral transfection.

That may be the problem: the proponents of hESC research are used to getting many times the publicity from hESC research than that received by the non-hESC researchers. And so, we get the concerns about "rhetoric."

There's those deceitful knee jerk reactionaries practicing their projection, again.

Biographic article on Yamanaka

Here's a cute biography of Shinya Yamanaka, lead researcher from the Japanese team that reported reprogramming of adult cells into embryonic-like stem cells.

As an M.D. myself, I find it interesting that, unlike veterinarians James Thomson of Wisconsin and Time Magazine Person of the Year, Hu Suk Hwang, Dr. Yamanaka is a human doctor, trained in orthopedics:

Yamanaka has spent most of his life in western Japan. A native of Osaka, he earned his medical degree at Kobe University and a doctorate in pharmacology at Osaka City University.

After completing his residency in orthopedic surgery, Yamanaka headed to the University of California, San Francisco, to do postdoctoral studies that laid the groundwork for his current research.

He does express concern about the possible uses of his research by unethical researchers:

Yamanaka worries about the road some people might take.

"We need to come up with some sort of rules about what kind of cells can be used and to what ends. Otherwise, someone may put this technology to use in troubling ways,” Yamanaka said.

The research's ethical and social implications are never far from the table in Yamanaka's laboratory, said Kazutoshi Takahashi, a junior professor who participated in the project.

"The potential problems are cut down when you use this method given that we don't have to use embryonic stem cells, and that's a good thing,” Takahashi said.

Since the debate isn't yet over about ethical vs. unethical stem cells and since some people (like embryonic and fetal stem cell researcher and sometimes guest Science editor, John Gearhart, MD) have admitted to putting pressure on researchers to make sure that they follow the official line to pursue "all promising areas" (echoed here by the stem cell industry trade association organization, BIO) kinds of stem cell research, I hesitated to post this link and the quotes. But someone should record the true "debate."

Translating Thomson’s “Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell Lines Derived from Human Somatic Cells”

Yu, Thomson, and all, from Wisconsin published their paper on reprogrammed induced Pluripotent Stem (iPS) cells from adult cells online in Science Express online, yesterday, just after the Yamanaka/Takahashi team from Japan published theirs in the journal, Cell. (The Thomson paper was not scheduled to go live online until the 22nd.)

As discussed on this blog, yesterday, Yamanaka’s group built on their earlier research published in 2006 and 2007, using mouse fibroblasts to prove that four genes, Oct4, Sox2, c-myc, and Klf4, could reprogram those cells to a state that resembled embryonic stem cells in all tests that they tried. Then, they used fibroblasts from commercially available samples from 1) a skin biopsy taken from the face of a 36 year-old Caucasian woman, 2) synovial cells (joint lining) from a 69 year old Caucasian male, and 3) neonate foreskin skin fibroblasts.

(This last is a common source of skin fibroblasts, with easily and ethically accessed skin tissue, collected at the circumcision of newborn boys.)

The Thomson team did not begin the basic research using mouse cells and did not simply go forward using the genes from the earlier experiments on mouse cells. Instead, they started at the beginning, using human Embryonic Stem Cells (hESC) that had been directed to become a special type of white blood cell, CD45+. This type of cell can be manipulated to demonstrate whether they had the functioning gene, Oct4 (a definite marker that is used to prove whether or not a cell is a hESC), by growing them in the presence of gentamycin, an antibacterial.

By adding some genes and removing others, the team determined that they had, “identified a core set of 4 genes, OCT4, SOX2, NANOG, and LIN28, that were capable of reprogramming human ES cell-derived somatic cells.” They also discovered that the cells could be reprogrammed into embryonic-like cells without Nanog, but that Nanog made it possible to recover more reprogrammed cells.

(From the text accompanying Fig.1: "In three independent experiments using different preparations of
mesenchymal cells, individual removal of either OCT4 or SOX2 from reprogramming combinations eliminated the appearance of reprogrammed clones, whereas the individual removal of either NANOG or LIN28 reduced the number of reprogrammed clones, but did not eliminate such clones entirely.")

Next, they tested this combination of genes in a commercially available, genetically modified cell culture, IMR90 fetal fibroblasts. (These cells were cultured from a little girl aborted at 16 weeks gestation. ) These cells are fetal cells, not adult cells, and they were chosen because they have been studied and the genome is well known. They do not grow well in the fluids and conditions that encourage cultures of hESCs and the researchers could identify them by the way that they look.

Next, in order to prove that the genes could reprogram “adult cells,” the team used fibroblast cultures from foreskins to produce 4 different cultures of reprogrammed induced Pluripotent Stem Cells.

The authors conclude,

"The human iPS cells described here meet the defining criteria we originally proposed for human ES cells, with the significant exception that the iPS cells are not derived from embryos. Similar to human ES cells, human iPS cells should prove useful for studying the development and function of human tissues, for discovering and testing new drugs, and for transplantation medicine."

Edited typos 11/21/07 17:30 PM (That could be the next neuroscience break through: why don't we see our typos until later?)