Come join other pro-life internet activists at ProLifeCon, the premier conference for the online pro-life community. On January 24, 2011, ProLifeCon will take place at the Family Research Council headquarters and will feature experts and legislators to inform you about the issues impacting the pro-life movement and give you ways to make a difference on blogs, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and the rest of the online world.

Confirmed speakers include:

• Jill Stanek, JillStanek.com
• Lila Rose, LiveAction
• Abby Johnson, AbbyJohnson.org
• More to come…

Register today by clicking here.

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The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which last month declared that Family Research Council, American Family Association, and several other socially conservative organizations are “anti-gay hate groups,” seems to be growing increasingly frantic in their efforts to defend this smear. But in their desperation, they have doubled down on the charge, only reinforcing how absurd it is.

On December 16, SPLC President and CEO J. Richard Cohen sent a letter to several of the individuals who signed an ad urging that liberals “Start Debating” homosexuality and “Stop Hating” groups that express disapproval of homosexual conduct in a civil manner. In defense of the “hate group” designation, Cohen stated this in his letter:

If a neo-Nazi group said all Jews are “vermin,” no one would argue with our characterizing it as a hate group. The same should be true for groups that knowingly spread demonizing falsehoods about gay men and lesbians.

There you have it. Cohen openly declares that he considers FRC fully equivalent to a “neo-Nazi” group that says, “all Jews are ‘vermin.’”

Where is Mr. Cohen’s evidence that Family Research Council, or anyone who works for FRC, has ever said that “all gay men and lesbians are ‘vermin’?” You will search in vain for such a statement.

For the record, FRC believes that every human being, including those who experience same-sex attractions and those who engage in homosexual conduct, is created in the image of God and is loved by Him. How this qualifies as “hate” is a mystery.

We will be preparing a more detailed response to Cohen’s charge that FRC spreads “falsehoods” in our well-documented research, which does show that certain harms are associated with homosexual conduct. Those wishing to examine that research in the meantime can refer to the FRC book Getting It Straight: What the Research Shows About Homosexuality or to our recent pamphlet, The Top Ten Myths About Homosexuality.

However, if comparing a large, widely-respected public policy organization (whose mission statement calls for defense of a “Judeo-Christian worldview”) to “a neo-Nazi group” that says, “all Jews are ‘vermin’” is not a “demonizing falsehood,” I don’t know what is.

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A recent Pew Internet Project Survey focused on the online activities which each generation participates in and the changes that have occurred over time.  This survey is particularly interesting, especially in the areas of using the internet to obtain religious information and donating to charity.

According to the survey, the “G.I. Generation,” those ages 74 and older are more than 50% likely to go online to look up religious information among other things, like email or social networking.  Compared to the “G.I. Generation,” the other groups surveyed were less than 50% likely to go online for the same information.  This demographic did not change over time either.

On the other hand, donations to charity remain at less than 50% likelihood across the generations.  The statistics on giving were constant without any noticeable increases, and this can be attributed to the current economic climate.

Overall, the results from this survey are not surprising, since there is a generational shift towards social networking.

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If you’re looking for that special Christmas gift, want something for your favorite biologist, or have a slightly macabre sense of humor, a company is selling cuddly stuffed versions of various germs and cells. The toys depict each microbe at a million times its actual size or larger, and each comes with an information card about their origins and avoiding illnesses they spread.

According to the owner of “Giant Microbes“, Drew Oliver:

“From the beginning they were designed to be whimsical, of course, with the eyes and features like that, but also scientifically sound – to the extent that a plush doll of a germ can be.”

The toys are meant to be educational, and have been used as teaching tools in numerous settings. Categories include Health (e.g., flu, common cold, stomach ache), Calamities (e.g., Black Death, anthrax, ebola), Tropicals (e.g., malaria, leishmania), and others. You can even search categories for your favorites based on the common or scientific name.
The Corporeals category includes an Adult Stem Cell (“The miraculous stem cell is the body’s dreamer – it can grow up to be whatever it wants to be.”)

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Scientists at Tel Aviv University have found what they called a “fountain of youth” for aging muscles–exercise. They showed that endurance exercise can increase the number of muscle adult stem cells, and enhances their ability to rejuvenate old muscles. In a lab version of the rat race, young and old rats ran on a treadmill for 20 minutes a day for a 13-week period (can’t you picture them working out in little sweat pants and head bands?) Younger animals showed a 20-35% increase in muscle adult stem cells retained, while older animals showed an even greater benefit, with a 33-47% increase in muscle stem cells, compared to sedentary controls. Endurance exercise also improved the levels of “spontaneous locomotion” in older animals, what the researchers called the feeling that tells our bodies to just get up and dance.

Prof. Dafna Benayahu and her team say their findings, published in PLOS One, explain for the first time why older people who have exercised throughout their lives age more gracefully. As we age, there is a decline in muscle mass and function as well as bone mass; this explains the increased risk of falling in the elderly. She hopes eventually to find a method to ameliorate the negative effects of aging by stimulating adult stem cells in the muscle.

Other studies have shown that exercise can stimulate production of new neurons and new brain cells from adult neural stem cells.

So get up and dance!

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A South Korean appeals court upheld the conviction of Hwang Woo-suk on embezzlement based on faked research and violating bioethics laws. The court reduced his sentence to 18 months (suspended for two years), for the embezzlement charge and threw out the fraud charge.

In 2004 and 2005, Hwang published papers in the journal Science claiming that he had created the first cloned human embryos, and obtained embryonic stem cells from the clones. In late 2005, it was found that Hwang had faked the results. He was indicted on fraud and embezzlement charges.

In October 2009 he was convicted of embezzling $719,000 in research funds and illegally buying human eggs.

Despite the fraud and problems associated with cloning, there are scientists and politicians who still want human clones.

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Overall I agree with the direction of FaithWorld’s questions on MARRI’s release of the Index of Belonging and Rejection, but first a few clarifications (followed by almost-disagreements):

1: I am Catholic, not Evangelical (though FRC is an Evangelical organization.  It does believe in religious freedom and builds across honest divides rather than keeping them.)

2: I would have gladly put in the religious attendance data but Census NEVER collects such data though I wish they would (other federal surveys do and the American Community Survey would be so much better if it did).  I hope you will push for that.

3: We have covered this anomaly (high worship and low marriage) and brought lots of attention to it.  See our own study which does this — based on the federal National Child Health Survey

4: Bill O’Hare, former editor of the Kids Count from the Annie E Casey Foundation was the first I know of to point out this anomaly. (Mississippi is the highest weekly church attending state but the lowest intact-family state).  This clearly points to a family / marriage crisis within the church.  Probably most within the Black church — but not solely there.  One cannot call oneself a serious Christian (unless one also calls oneself an unreformed one and a sinner) while simultaneously breaking universal Christian doctrine on sex and marriage.  This bears further digging into.

5: All the deep digging into the relationship between religious practice and marital stability points to a very clear and very strong relationship between both.  (We have a review of that literature coming up on our website in the next few months.  This will only heighten the anomaly, not diminish it.

(a) Our Mapping America Project , drawing on federal surveys only, repeatedly illustrates that the intact family that worships weekly is the strongest social unit and the most productive by far.  So weekly religious practice and marriage are very important for the strength of the country. Let’s not pit one against the other.

(b) What one can likely take from the data is that if the Southern states did not have the high levels of worship they do have they would be in an even worse situation.

6: The Mormon states do very well and overall most exemplify (at the state level) this strength of relationship, a relationship which holds across all denominations.  There is clearly grist for the Christian church-leadership mill here.

7: Our data point towards a need for reform within the church.  History teaches two lessons about Christianity: practiced it yields enormous benefits, talked about but not practiced it yields untold suffering and it a great cause for scandal and shame.

10: The history of Christianity is a history of reform upon reform upon reform. Seems like we need it again.. at least that is what I take from the data.

8: As I hope this will make clear (and I hope FaithWorld will notice) MARRI is  interested in the truth, not ideological point-scoring. There is much to unravel in the tension between the macro data (state level marriage vs. worship data) and micro data (the greater the religious attendance/ prayer the stronger and more stable the marriage).  But it is precisely these “contrary” data that are the source of intellectual breakthrough.

9: To add to this dilemma: The social sciences (to date and probably always) cannot measure the heart (the inner workings, desires, cover-ups, prayers — or lack thereof). It is confined to measuring externalities — measurable behaviors and words.  Getting to the hidden interiorities is beyond its competence. Christ excoriated the religious leaders of his time for what was not in their heart even as the externals looked rather devout.  We may be in the same situation.  I know I often am.

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Duke researchers have shown that applying a protein secreted by adult stem cells can repair heart function and reduce scarring. The group had previously shown that adult mesenchymal stem cells could reduce heart and restore function in rodent hearts. Their newest study looked at the mechanism behind the success of adult stem cells in treating heart damage.

They found that a natural protein, called “secreted frizzled related protein 2 (sfrp2)”, was a key factor in the heart repair seen with adult stem cells. In a rat model, they found that application of the protein after heart attack prevented fibrous scarring within two weeks, and began to restore heart function within four weeks.

Dr. Victor Dzau, senior author of the study, said:

“We found that giving the study rats the protein sfrp2 strongly improved heart function in the critical pumping chamber, the left ventricle, after a myocardial infarction. We observed that sfrp2 at therapeutic doses reduced heart muscle death and also directly prevented deposits of collagen, and thus reduced the scarring that can affect heart function.”

The results were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Scientists at the University at Buffalo have engineered adult stem cells that can grow continuously in culture. Normal adult stem cells have a limited lifespan in the laboratory, which frustrates scientists who want to study them over the long term, but does not prevent their being grown and used for current adult stem cell transplants.

The scientists developed the new cell lines by genetically engineering mesenchymal stem cells, a type of adult stem cell from bone marrow that can form other cell types and repair various tissues. They named the new cells “MSC Universal”. The new adult stem cells show no evidence of aging in culture, function as normal mesenchymal stem cells, and do not form tumors in animal testing (unlike embryonic stem cells).

According to the project leader, Dr. Techung Lee, an MSC-Universal cell line could be generated from any donor.

“Our stem cell research is application-driven. If you want to make stem cell therapies feasible, affordable and reproducible, we know you have to overcome a few hurdles. Part of the problem in our health care industry is that you have a treatment, but it often costs too much. In the case of stem cell treatments, isolating stem cells is very expensive. The cells we have engineered grow continuously in the laboratory, which brings down the price of treatments.”

One of the mechanisms by which adult stem cells help regenerate or repair damaged tissues is by releasing growth factors that encourage existing cells in the human body to function and grow. Lee has previously published evidence showing that injecting adult stem cells into skeletal muscle can stimulate repair of the heart. More recently his lab has identified some of the factors involved in the stimulation of repair, published in the journal Heart and Circulatory Physiology.

The University of Buffalo has applied for a patent to protect Lee’s discovery, so there is as yet no publication about the new cells.

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Poor Jim Wallis is almost beside himself.

In an article published in The Huffington Post, Wallis’ class warfare rhetoric pours forth without stint or measure, spilling over upon those of us who have the audacity to believe that when a person earns money legally, it should not be unduly confiscated by the government.

Here is a sampling of Wallis’ careful, nuanced, ruminative, above-the-fray language:

• “higher tax rates on the very rich”
• “the very wealthiest Americans”
• “Goldman Sachs traders”
• “hedge fund gamblers”
• “a handful of very rich people”
• “There is socialism in America, but it’s only for the rich.”
• ” … fighting the people whose greed, recklessness, and utter lack of concern for the common good have led us into this terrible crisis”
• “casino gamblers on Wall Street”
• “More tax breaks and benefits for the very wealthiest people in America is not only bad economics and bad policy; it is fundamentally immoral.”

Anyone for the barricades?

These huzzahs of indignation, full of stereotyped Leftist boilerplate, reflect either ignorance of how the economy grows or else a bitter ideological conviction that wealth is wrong and that the wealthy are ontologically evil.

Neither proposition is appealing, or convincing. After two years of massive federal spending and micromanagement of the economy (to the point where a President of the United States actually fired the head of General Motors), job losses have climbed and we are now facing the prospect of actual deflation.

Continue reading »

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A Joslin Diabetes Center team has shown that treatment of aged mice with a compound can rejuvenate their muscle stem cells. The lab of senior author Amy Wagers developed a way of screening chemicals that would promote regeneration in muscle stem cells from older mice, and identified a compound, A25, that selectively blocks a protein involved in TGF beta signaling, a cellular signaling pathway important to stem cell growth.

The drug had no effect on muscle stem cells in young mice, but in older mice the compound gave old muscle stem cells the regenerative ability of cells from young mice. Because this compound would stimulate cells throughout the body, it would not be useful in humans, but the results do show that stimulation of old muscle adult stem cells is possible. An appropriate compound could potentially be useful to repair wasted or damaged muscle in older people.

The results were presented at the annual meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology in Philadelphia.

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Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago have shown that they can anchor teeth back in the jaw using adult stem cells. The technique could be widely applicable for replanting teeth lost through gum disease or an accident.

The scientists used adult stem cells obtained from the periodontal ligament of molars extracted from mice. The cells were grown in culture and then seeded onto clean rat molars, then the molars were placed into the tooth sockets of rats. After two to four months, the stem cells aligned and formed new fibrous attachments between the tooth and bone, firmly attaching the replanted tooth into the animal’s mouth. Molars that were replanted without adult stem cells were either lost or loosely attached and were reabsorbed by the jaw.

According to senior author Thomas Diekwisch:

“Our strategy could be used for replanting teeth that were lost due to trauma or as a novel approach for tooth replacement using tooth-shaped replicas.”

The study was published recently in the journal Tissue Engineering

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K. Lloyd Billingsley’s article in today’s Washington Times (“Education Payouts Lack Payoff”) on the need to cut back the influence of the Department of Education contained some interesting facts about Canada.  It turns out that leftist, progressive Canada has no equivalent of the U.S. Department of Education.  Education policy is set much more locally.  Here is the analysis:

Canada has no federal education ministry or department and no federal Cabinet official for K-12 education. At the federal level, Canada spends virtually nothing on K-12 education and on a per-student basis, spends about 20 percent less than the United States. Yet Canada is outperforming the United States.

On the International Student Assessment, a system of tests measuring the performance of 15-year-olds in reading, math and science literacy, Canada tops the United States by a wide margin. In math, Americans score 474, well below the international average of 498, and far below Canada’s 527. On the 2006 Progress in Reading Literacy Study exam, the major Canadian provinces of British Columbia, Alberta and Ontario significantly outscore the United States in fourth-grade reading.

In Canada, all funding and policymaking takes place at the provincial and local levels. In America, education is the responsibility of the states, but the federal government has increasingly pursued a top-down approach, with measures such as President Bush’s No Child Left Behind and President Obama’s Race to the Top. Mr. Obama – who sends his own children to an exclusive private school – has also been active at the local level.

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Researchers at the University of Nebraska Medical Center have uncovered a pathway to activate existing adult stem cells within the eye, coaxing them to transform into photoreceptors. The study suggests that adult stem cells within the retina can be chemically induced to regenerate photoreceptors and restore vision, without transplanting any cells into the eye. The work could provide a route to treatment of age-related macular degeneration and retinitis pigmentosa.

The retina of mammals contains cells known as Müller cells that help with maintenance of the retina. The scientists found that a rare subset of Müller cells act as stem cells, and can be activated in the laboratory to form photoreceptor cells. When rats with retinal damage were treated to stimulate the Müller cells in their retinas, there was a significant improvement in light perception in treated animals.

Senior author Iqbal Ahmad said:

“This is really exciting. It’s a tantalizing stem cell approach to correct vision loss … to harness existing stem cells and coax them into repairing the retina. Before, stem cell transplantation was regarded to be the only practical way to restore vision. This is a radically different approach, and best of all, it is relatively safe and free from controversy.”

The study was published in the journal PLOSOne.

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Gen. James F. Amos, Commandant of the Marine Corps, suggested in an interview yesterday that allowing homosexuals to serve openly in the military could not only harm unit cohesion, but could actually increase casualties. Here are the opening paragraphs of the Washington Post report on the subject:

Marine general suggests repeal of ‘don’t ask’ could result in casualties

The Marine Corps’ top general suggested Tuesday that allowing gays to serve openly in the military could result in more casualties because their presence on the battlefield would pose “a distraction.”

“When your life hangs on the line,” said Gen. James F. Amos, the commandant of the Marine Corps, “you don’t want anything distracting. . . . Mistakes and inattention or distractions cost Marines’ lives.”

In an interview with newspaper and wire service reporters at the Pentagon, Amos was vague when pressed to clarify how the presence of gays would distract Marines during a firefight. But he cited a recent Defense Department survey in which a large percentage of Marine combat veterans predicted that repealing the “don’t ask, don’t tell” law would harm “unit cohesion” and their tight-knit training for war.

“So the Marines came back and they said, ‘Look, anything that’s going to break or potentially break that focus and cause any kind of distraction may have an effect on cohesion,’ ” he said. “I don’t want to permit that opportunity to happen. And I’ll tell you why. If you go up to Bethesda [Naval] Hospital . . . Marines are up there with no legs, none. We’ve got Marines at Walter Reed [Army Medical Center] with no limbs.”

Amos had said previously that allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly could cause “distractions” and “risks” for combat units. But his remarks Tuesday were the first time that he or any other senior military leader has suggested that repealing the 17-year-old “don’t ask, don’t tell” law could directly endanger troops and cost lives.

Advocates for repeal of the current law against homosexuality in the military are scoffing at Gen. Amos’ remarks, insisting there is no conceivable scenario under which the presence of homosexual troops could lead to casualties.

However, retired Marine Gen. John J. Sheehan gave a specific example of how this could happen in his testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee last March—an example drawn from his own personal experience in combat in Vietnam. Here is his description of the incident, from the transcript of the March 18 hearing (bottom of p. 16 to p. 17 in the link):

General SHEEHAN. Senator, in my experience, homosexual marines create problems on the battlefield. Let me give you a case and point.

Early years of Vietnam, 9th Marines, West of Da Nang, rifle company on a ridgeline combat outpost, the intelligence was that the North Vietnamese were going to attack, that night. The unit was put on 50-percent alert, which meant one slept, one stood on watch. About 1 o’clock in the morning, a fight broke out in a foxhole because the young marine was being molested by his squad leader. To the right of that foxhole, there was a machinegun section that opened up and almost killed a combat patrol that was out in the front.

Now, the natural question is, ‘‘Okay. Well, fine, don’t you have rules that deal with assault?’’ and the answer to that’s yes.

The real issue, though, was that, after we sorted this whole thing out, the sergeant—the squad leader essentially said, ‘‘Look, I was just adjusting his equipment, waking him up because the—I thought there was something out to the front.’’ He denied it happened. The young PFC, who was new to the organization, said, ‘‘Wait a minute. This really happened to me. He was molesting me.’’ The unit took sides, naturally. The squad leader was a popular person, been around for a while. The PFC was a new kid. For about 3 days, that unit divided down the middle—those that supported the popular squad leader, those that kind of thought the new kid might be believable.

The only reason we sorted the issue out was because the sergeant committed the offense about 3 days later. But, the real tragedy of this story is, the young PFC continually insisted, for a long period of time, that nobody in his organization believed it happened. He lost faith in his chain of command.

So, I would argue the case that, if you look at—and you can say that I’m some old guy that’s been around for a while, and been—probably been around for too long. But, I read——

Senator MCCAIN. You’re not the only one that——

General SHEEHAN. Well—but, I read the Defense Department’s recently released sexual assault report. And the thing that really bothers me about this issue is that the report says—and this is last year’s report—there’s been an overall 11-percent rise in sexual assaults in the military; 16-percent rise in Afghanistan and Iraq; 32—over 3200 cases of sexual—we’re not talking about sexual harassment, we’re talking about sexual assault. Seven percent of those— that’s about 226—male on male assaults, where rape and sodomy took place. And the Department of Defense will clearly indicate that that’s an underreporting.

I would stipulate that, from my days in Vietnam in the early ’60s, when I had this sergeant that almost got a combat patrol killed, that a—226 male soldiers and marines who are molested—that there’s something wrong with our sexual behavior policy.

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Tomorrow, the Council of Europe, European Court of Human Rights will issue its opinion on a pivotal abortion case, ABC v. Ireland. The case has been dubbed the “Roe v. Wade of Europe,” and will have significant bearing on abortion law internationally. The plaintiffs are three Irish women who claim that Ireland’s abortion law – the procedure is illegal unless the mother’s life is at risk – placed their “well being and health” in jeopardy in short because they had to travel abroad to abort their babies.

In the words of one person involved in the case, “ABC v. Ireland should be an open and shut win for the Irish government. One would think that the Court would not even entertain oral arguments in the ABC case, because it has to do with a sovereign state’s constitutional provisions on a subject on which it is permitted to do as it wishes under legal precedent from the European Court of Human Rights.” Serious questions also exist regarding basic applicability/appropriateness given the fact that the plaintiffs sought no form of domestic remedy prior to bringing this case to the European Court of Human Rights.

In November, 2008, FRC joined with the Alliance Defense Fund and other pro-life, pro-family groups to provide written observations to the court.  Below are short excerpts from this document and here is the link for the full statement:

The Court Must Scrutinise Domestic Remedies

2. Article 35 of the Convention requires an applicant to exhaust domestic

remedies, and Article 13 entitles applicants to a basic procedure for trying to

protect their rights. Irish law and practice establishes not only the existence of

remedies sufficient to satisfy Article 13, but a high burden of exhaustion.

3. Under Article 35(1) therefore, the Court must decide whether the

Applicant, under the collective circumstances of the case, did everything they

could reasonably be expected to do to exhaust domestic remedies.1

Member States Have Sovereignty to Protect the Right to Life

7. Ireland’s sovereign right to determine when life begins and to determine

the appropriate protections therein is based on the paramount importance of the

right to life affirmed in Article 2, which outweighs other Convention rights. This

Court recognised that other rights, such as the right to privacy and bodily integrity

within the context of pregnancy, are not absolute and must be analysed in

conjunction with the rights of the unborn to life and the rights of States to

determine their own definition of when life begins and how to protect unborn

children as a result.6

11. The principle of respect for national sovereignty, and not the erosion

thereof, forms the basis for Convention rights themselves, because those rights

stemmed from the treaty obligations undertaken by the High Contracting parties.

For any organ of the Council of Europe to hold that Ireland’s laws protecting life

must be liberalised would create a new Convention right to which Ireland never

acceded, and would place obligations on Ireland to which it never became party.

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Spanish surgeons have reported pioneering work using a patient’s own bone marrow adult stem cells to repair craniofacial damage. The group has recently published their results in the journal Plastic & Reconstructive Surgery for their first three patients.

One patient suffered from nerve impairment, a pathological fracture, and complete wasting of bone, muscle and skin, leading to life-threatening problems. At 12 months after the adult stem cell treatment, the patient had new blood vessel formation, bone regeneration, fracture consolidation and total nerve function recovery. Muscles later resumed function, and a destroyed salivary gland soon reactivated. Two other patients with advanced disease involving bone loss and other nerve defects were also treated. After adult stem cell treatment, bone formed rapidly and nerve function fully recovered. All patients also underwent minor surgery to receive dental implants in their newly-regenerated jawbones, and eight weeks later, doctors attached the dental prosthesis (teeth) to the implants, restoring oral function.

Paco Vidal, who was involved in the design of the stem cell production, said:

“The outcome of these treatments with the stem cells has surpassed our wildest expectations. The surgeons observed early bone formation in the afflicted areas that eventually resulted in complete healing.”

Adult stem cells continue to provide real treatments for real patients, now.

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The field of induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells continues to move rapidly. It was only 2006 when Yamanaka published the first paper showing that a normal cell, such as a skin cell, could be reprogrammed to behave like an embryonic stem cell, by adding four genes through the use of viruses. In 2007, Yamanaka’s lab and Thomson’s lab independently showed that the technique could work with human cells. Since that time there have been numerous reports of different tissues, different species, and variations on the reprogramming (here is a brief review.) One goal has been eliminating use of DNA as a tool for the reprogramming, eventually using only simple chemicals.

Recently a Scripps lab has come close to using only chemicals for reprogramming normal cells to iPS cells. The report, published in the journal Cell Stem Cell, describes the use of a few drug-like chemicals to replace all but one (Oct-4) of the added genes. A future goal is to replace Oct-4, a master regulator of pluripotency, in the chemical cocktail.

Senior author Sheng Ding says:

“That would be the last step toward achieving the Holy Grail. Our latest discovery brings us one step closer to this dream. We are working toward creating drugs that are totally chemically defined, where we know every single component and precisely what it does, without causing genetic damage.”

Because iPS cells can be made without the use of embryos, eggs or cloning, the technique provides an ethical route to pluripotent (embryonic-like) stem cells. Using only a chemical mixture would eliminate one other ethical problem–some of the tools used (some genes, viruses, and cell lines used) are derived from human tissue. This leaves some of the tools as ethically-tainted, even if the technique itself is not problematic.

Still, there remains a problem with any pluripotent stem cell–their propensity to grow, leading to tumors. Meanwhile, adult stem cells are already treating thousands of patients now.

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Georgetown University Medical Center researchers have shown results that suggest men may be able to make their own new insulin-secreting cells, potentially providing their own transplants for treatment of Type I (juvenile) diabetes. Why just men? Because the scientists took the stem cells from testicular tissue. In particular, the scientists isolated spermatogonial stem cells (SSCs) extracted from testicular tissue, and found that in culture the cells can morph into insulin-secreting beta islet cells normally found in the pancreas. They tested the cells by transplanting some into the backs of immune deficient diabetic mice, and found they were able to decrease glucose levels in the mice, demonstrating the cells were producing enough insulin to reduce hyperglycemia.

The results, so far unpublished, were presented at the American Society of Cell Biology annual meeting in Philadelphia.

The lead investigator, G. Ian Gallicano, says:

“These are male germ cells as well as adult stem cells. We found that once you take these cells out of the testes niche, they get confused, and will form all three germ layers within several weeks. These are true, pluripotent stem cells.”

This is not the first report of pluripotent stem cells derived from testicular tissue. Previous reports were published in 2004, in 2006, in 2007, and in 2009 by an international collaboration and a German group. But the Georgetown report appears to be the first using human tissue to show production of insulin-secreting cells.

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Researchers from the University of South Florida have shown that adult stem cells from human umbilical cord blood can enhance the survival and maturation of brain neurons from both young and old laboratory animals. The research may have implications for degenerative diseases of the brain, as well as for brain trauma.

The study was done in the laboratory using neurons taken from a specific area of the brain–the hippocampus. According to Dr. Alison Willing, senior author of the study:

“As we age, cognitive function tends to decline. Changes in cognitive function are accompanied by changes in the hippocampus, an area of the brain where long term memory, as well as other functions, are located, an area of the brain among those first to suffer the effects of diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease.”

The aging population is more susceptible to the stresses and diseases that affect this part of the brain. Interestingly, the positive effects of adult stem cells from cord blood were more pronounced with neurons from older animals. In addition, not only were the cord blood stem cells able to protect and stimulate growth of the neurons, they also stimulated growth of cells known as dendrites, the branching neurons which act as signaling nerve communication channels.

The results of the study have just been published in the journal Aging and Disease.

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